Potato onion failure
We've been experimenting with
potato onions for two years now, and I'm
ready to pronounce them a failure. On paper, the perennial onions
looked like a great choice since you can easily save sets and don't
have to buy seeds (and baby them in the early spring.)
And this year's harvest
looks pretty good when I tell you that I pulled about fourteen pounds
of onions out of seven garden beds. The problem is that we've
never been able to get more than a few of our potato onions to exceed
an inch in diameter. Peeling enough potato onions to equal one
seed-started onion would take half an hour!
I've tried every trick I
could think of to get my potato onions to make bigger bulbs instead of
just lots and lots of small bulbs. I've tried different
planting dates,
snipped off the flowers when they appeared, and even dreamed that Eric
Toensmeier was right and you have to plant small bulbs to get big onions. No dice.
Even though we're not
going to replant any of this year's potato onions, I'm not quite ready
to give up on the idea of potato onions. I've noticed that
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has stopped selling the Loretta Yellow
Multiplier Onions we bought from them and are now offering a different
variety. Maybe too many people complained and they came up with a
better option?
I'd be curious to hear
if any of you have had better luck with potato onions. Any onions
that head up to a decent size? If so, what variety did you grow?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I emailed the company that sold us the bulbs (and our awesome garlic) and got this reply:
I need to ponder a bit more, but I may give their new variety a shot.