Potato onions worth their salt
From the number of times
I've posted about them, you'd think that potato onions are a mainstay
of our diet. To follow our adventures from the beginning, read
the posts in this order:
- Potato onions (October 2009)
- Different
kinds of perennial onions (December 2009)
- Potato onion cultivation (June 2010)
- When
to plant potato onions (September 2010)
- Potato
onion bulb size (January 2011)
- Potato
onion failure (June 2011)
- Growing
bigger potato onions (September 2011)
As you can tell if you
follow all those links, potato onions were a cool idea that didn't really pan
out...until now!
The new variety we planted
last fall --- Yellow Potato Onions from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
--- are acting more like the books say they should. About a
quarter of the plants simply made one big bulb, and the other 75% have
divided into clusters of four to ten smaller bulbs. Most
important, every bulb looks big enough to be worth peeling, even the
smallest ones.
The great thing about
perennial vegetables is that once you figure them out, they're much
easier to grow than annuals. Take our garlic, for example ---
we'll be pulling
the heads out of the ground this week, curing
them, then planting
the biggest cloves in the fall. That's the sum total
of the garlic workload for the year (except for occasional weeding and
mulching, of course). I want onions to be that simple!
So we won't eat a single
potato onion in 2012. They'll all go back in the ground, where
the big bulbs will (hopefully) turn into lots of smaller bulbs and the
small bulbs will (hopefully) turn into one or a few big bulbs.
Maybe next year (or the year after) there will be enough to eat and I
can stop fiddling with transplanting tiny onion seedlings in the early
spring.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
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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Mitsy --- You treat them pretty much like garlic --- harvest them, cure them, then plant individual heads (rather than cloves for garlic) in the fall.
You could eat the tops in the spring, but I suspect that would take a lot of energy away from bulb development. We like Egyptian onions (another perennial) for greens instead.
We haven't tasted this variety yet --- I'll probably cook one just to see. The other variety tasted a bit more garlicky than a normal onion, but it wasn't a typical potato onion....