Do I need to replant Egyptian onions every year?
Several
people have asked me, "Do I have to pull up my Egyptian onions and replant them every
year?" I'm not surprised that they ask --- even though Egyptian
onions are perennials, the tops die back for about a month at the peak
of summer and the plants look a bit dead. But as August draws to
a close, new green shoots poke up from the bulbs, proving that the
onions are still very much alive.
In the past, I've yanked
out the bottom bulbs during the dormant month and replanted top bulbs
in new beds. But the bottom bulbs don't rot in the compost pile,
so I ended up with a lot of onions. This year,
I'm letting the Egyptian onion beds alone to see if I can treat them
like true perennials. The only problem I foresee is overcrowding
--- each bottom bulb has now split into several new bulbs. Since
I yank whole plants now and then to make Butternut Squash and
Egyptian Onion Soup,
hopefully this overcrowding won't be an issue.
As a final note, we sold
all but about a hundred of our onions, and I saved the last ones for a
quick giveaway. Just leave a comment on this post before August
29 and I'll choose one lucky winner at random to receive the last of
our onion top bulbs.
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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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...you already won the last giveaway! I never heard from you, so I figured you'd disappeared. Email me (anna@kitenet.net) your mailing address and I'll put your winnings in the mail!
Everybody else, if Bladerunner emails me a mailing address, there might be a bit less than a 100 onions in this giveaway. But I'll be sure to give whatever is left to whoever wins!