How do you harvest your walking onions?

[Leenstar]

Without going into too much detail, I planted walking onions this fall and this spring in my garden. They overwintered great. I want to keep them going.

With all the topsets, this shouldn't be too hard. Only thing is, that to dig out full stalks, I have to hope that if I break off and replant the topsets that they will fill in the gap.

I don't have tons of space to turn over to onions, but I want to keep enough growing stock for the future.

I have taken off the topsets to use in cooking but they are tine compared the meter talk parent plants in the garden.

How do you guys manage these onions for both use and for continuation?

[ottawagardener]

I use mostly just the greens from the parents and not the topsets as I find them small and fiddly so I just leave them alone near the middle of the season and there are always babies. Besides, it was my understanding that they were perennial so as long as you don't harvest the parent bulb, you should keep getting topsets. If you have a decent patch, there are almost always a few strays.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

May 31, 2011 20:18:02 GMT -5 Leenstar said:

How do you guys manage these onions for both use and for continuation?

I keep a perennial patch of them that provides top-sets for planting, and the earliest spring green onions for eating. I only harvest onions for eating in the very early spring by digging with a shovel. It's basically a wild patch that grows however it likes. I harvest along the edges to keep it from expanding to fill the whole garden. Most seasons of the year there are some bulbils in it that haven't managed to get good contact with the soil in order to root. By late spring the greens are too stringy to eat so I just harvest top-sets from them. (I only use top-sets for planting, and occasionally plop an entire cluster into a jar of pickles for flavor only.)

I collect the top-sets and plant individual bulbils into rows in my annual garden. These are pulled a few weeks to a few months later for use as green onions, (as soon as I notice the beginnings of a flower stalk).

Any onions in the annual garden that are not harvested are tilled under in the fall. I get a good harvest of volunteers first thing in the spring.

Bulbils planted in the fall can be slow starting in the spring, so for the earliest spring onions I like to have a row that has grown undisturbed for a few months during the previous growing season.