it's a walking onion:) you can replant the top sets and if you leave the bulbs in the ground, they will grow and divide into bulbs as big as shallots with a stronger flavour than a shallot.

It could either be walking onions or garlic. Those are small topsets and to me they look more like garlic bulbils. The way to tell which one it is, is by looking at the leaves. If they are flat it's garlic, if they are hollow and tubular they are walking onions.

Rodney

Botanically speaking I think walking onions are shallots. When mine die back in summer, I pull them up and cure them in the shade. Many of the plants will cure out an elongated red shallot with a remarkably short six-week dormancy period.

I have never seen garlic topsets that large.

We eat the largest of the walking onion topsets, and save the smaller ones and replant them in the fall in a fresh bed. In my area even perennial onions must be rotated to prevent problems with onion root maggots.

Walking, topset, Eygptian, tree onions - all are natural hybrids of A. cepa (regular onions) and A. fistulosum (Welsh onion), and are given the binominal of Allium ÃÂproliferum. By and large, easy and hardy, also very perennial, they do not set seed but rather large bulbils on the order of garlic but on a big hollow tubular stem, and much larger bulbils generally than most garlic. All parts are edible, but the mature leaves can be a bit fibrous.

There are quite a few selected varieties but most gardeners grow local landraces that are handed around from friend to friend and relative to relative.