Potato Onions and True Potato Onion Seed TPOS

[davidp]

Jun 24, 2017 9:54:29 GMT -5 davidp said:

Here are some normally-developed red ones now bulbling up nicely.

[davidp]

Here are some green and coral mountain, along with some Dakota red, planted as bulbs last fall, which are showing flower/seed formation. Photo taken 3 weeks ago, they have now shed their skins and are developing flowers.

[davidp]

Jun 24, 2017 10:14:13 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

Very nice davidp , thanks for posting pics. May I inquire as to your general growing region?

Yes, I'm in eastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod to be specific, zone 7a, basically a sandbar with some topsoil sprinkled on top.
Everything below 6" or so is sand all the way down to the bedrock.
So, if you want well-drained soil, here it is.
OTOH, organic matter and amendments must be applied very regularly, as soil nutrients wash down to the water table after every rainfall.
But, if you diligently attend to the soil, it is a great environment for growing alliums. And a lot of other vegetables.

[davidp]

Here are a photos of a couple of my beds. The first one is a combination of several different tpos plantings: dutch red shallot, pikant shallot, SESE po, dakota landrace po, and Dakota red po. The second one is is all green mountain tpos.

[davidp]

BTW, somewhat off topic, here's a photo of some of my Welsh onions in blossom:

[davidp]

Here are the coral mountain flower tops as of yesterday . . .

[davidp]

Jun 25, 2017 9:48:12 GMT -5 davidp said:

Here are the coral mountain flower tops as of yesterday . . .

[kazedwards]

Glad it worked for ya davidp. Great looking potato onions too!

[mjc]

Jun 26, 2017 9:31:16 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

Very nice crops davidp, thanks for staying at it and posting the pics!

Beautiful large flower umbels on your Coral Mountain. My KWGM foliage, bulbs, and their flower umbels get much larger than my old strain of yellow potato onion, as well as my Dutch red shallot. I wonder if breaking free of any virus loads by planting true seed will cause an increase in size of the yellow potato onion and possibly the Dutch red shallot plants and umbels. I am kind of expecting such a thing to happen but we'll see. I am not obsessed about getting larger onions or shallots, not my primary goal, just an interesting thing to me.

Usually, seed grown are larger because of that reason...so, yeah, there's a very good chance of a size increase.

[davidp]

.[/quote]Usually, seed grown are larger because of that reason...so, yeah, there's a very good chance of a size increase.
[/quote]

To give you some idea of the dramatic differences in size that true seed can produce, check out the difference between my normal size shallots, and their true seed offspring still bulbling up.

[mjc]

Most of what is sold/used as shallots aren't...especially the reds. They are another A. cepa 'perennial' that splits. 'True' shallots/griselle are a different species A. oschaninii and probably will benefit from sexual reproduction too, but probably won't show such a dramatic increase in size.

It wouldn't surprise me at all, that if ALL the A cepa varieties/groupings/etc are just artificial constructs based upon what we use a certain cultivar for. I'm beginning to think that any A. cepa can be easily turned into 'single' bulb annual, splitting perennial, 'shallot' or anything in between. And that the only real division in A. cepa is the day-length bulbing trigger, and that isn't even an absolute (I'm leaning towards the 'middle ground' being the 'original' trigger).

[davidp]

Jun 26, 2017 18:29:07 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

Wow that is quite a difference. Was there any possible or likely crossing of the shallots with anything or were they isolated when they flowered and produced the seed used to grow these out?

No possibility of crossing. These shallots were the only onion-type allium (also grow garlic & leeks there) at this location.
I've grown these shallots for quite a few years now, and never saw them sending up flower stalks until last summer, when we had
a significant drought.

One patch I watered regularly, and those flowers, good-sized and beautiful, produced no usable seed. The other patch I
ignored, and those sent up small and scrawny flowers, and those produced true seed. I'm now a firm believer that stressing the
plants increases the possibility of viable seed production.

From the second patch, I got a total of 77 seeds. Those were sown in potting soil in late January this year; 20 germinated and survived.
These were grown under lights until March, when they were put into the (unheated) greenhouse. They were planted into beds in early April.
They have all grown very well since. The color range is from pure white, to lavender, to dark red. There are several with divisions (doubles only).

I have great hopes for this group, since the original shallots always produced well for me in that soil & micro-climate, and hopefully this
true seed offspring will also do well there as well.

[davidp]

Toomanyirdons said

I don't really know what to expect . . .

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Aye,
that's indeed the issue.



And Now . . .
After reading this entire thread,
(and including the True Garlic Seed thread),

I'm really at a loss trying to explain exactly why

I'm doing this stuff,

and I'm even more at a loss trying to figure out,

why everybody else is doing it too.


(Now, utilize your beat for the following lines,

add your own rhythm and rap.)


Is it for the money?
is it for the fame?
is it for the
adulation?
is it for the name?

Is it to determine
to be a total fool?

or

is it to become

the ultimate nerd,

you never quite became

in school?


bada-bing

bada-boom

[steev]

Nice "Sopranos" wrap-up, there; always good to bring some "culcha" into these down-and-dirty doings; very uplifting.

Those of us who were ultimate nerds in school feel your pain at not quite failing to make the cut; "normal" ain't all it's claimed to be; it's really hard to be simultaneously excellent and utterly out of touch; keep trying; practice makes perfectly obscure.

[davidp]

Hey everybody,

I'm starting to harvest my TPOS onions now.
The leaves have mostly fallen over and are still mostly green with various amounts of browning.
I'm going to lay them out over large screen racks.
However, I'm wondering about whether to speed up the drying/curing process by trimming off the leaves first.
I've heard pros and cons about doing this.
What say you all?