I appreciated the reminder since I'd meant to taste a potato onion, then got caught up in the summer gardening and preservation marathon and forgot all about it.  Before committing several beds to growing out all of this year's onions, it was definitely worth cutting a few open to see how they taste.

I'll give you the bad news first --- many of the big potato onions were starting to rot inside only two months after harvest!  Although curing and storage could be the issue, I treated the potato onions the same way I did my garlic and haven't seen any rot issues there, so I'm afraid big potato onions just might not be good keepers.

I discovered the root of the problem when I cut the bulbs open.  The big potato onions were really multiple smaller bulbs mashed together rather than one solid circle, and the rot did seem to concentrate between the small bulbs.  (This is also the reason why planting a big potato onion results in several smaller onions the next year, while if you plant a small onion, you get one big onion back.)

I washed and cut off the troubled spots and cooked the onions up in a lightly seasoned stir fry so I could really sample the flavor.  (No, I don't eat bulb onions raw.)  Here's the good news --- they were oniony and delicious!  If anything, I think the potato onions were a little sweeter than the ones I generally grow from seed.  We definitely won't have a hard time cooking with potato onions.

I'm curious to hear from readers who have grown potato onions.  Do you have to eat the big bulbs right away to keep them from rotting?  Do you cure and store them differently from other onions and garlic?  I definitely want to keep growing potato onions for flavor and ease of cultivation, but don't mind tweaking my system a bit if necessary.

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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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