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amyinowasso

Onion "flowers"

Last years red onions sprouted in storage and I had DH plant 6 or 8 expecting to have them flower for the bees. These have the kind of flower like walking onions, little leaves growing out of the bud. I don't know what kind they were, I bought them locally and the whites were 1015's and Dixondale label, but the label was gone from the reds. Think they will clone? I really expected them to flower sooner. The one onion that has bolted from this year looks much the same as these.

Comments (8)

  • 9 years ago

    I would like to know what you get from this.

  • 9 years ago

    By clone, do you mean come true from seed? It would depend on the variety and whether it is a stable OP or a hybrid. You won't know for sure until you get seed, save it, replant it and grow it out.

    I threw some leftover red onion plants on the ground under the pecan tree one year. I didn't even plant them---just dropped them on the ground. They rooted in, grew, formed bulbs, and eventually went to seed. I left them there for the tiny pollinators and beneficial insects who love their flowers. (I grow ornamental alliums with the daffodils just so the pollinators and beneficials will have those early flowers too.) That little colony reseeded and came back for several years underneath the pecan tree---maybe for 5 or 6 years until the flooding of 2015 wiped them out. Since I never harvested them, I cannot speak to the quality of the onion they produced, but the bulbs looked the same as the original ones in my garden from that same bunch of Dixondale onion plants. They probably were either Red Creole or Southern Belle.

  • 9 years ago

    By clone I meant that plant growing from the bud being the same hybrid or variety as the original, since it's not flowering, but making leaves. It looks like the walking onions look. Maybe the seeds germinated in the bud? Are onions self pollinating? I'm ok with onion greens. DH likes scallions and I've never gotten my "green onion" seeds to do much. The leaves on these are really tough. He used some the other day and they were quite crunchy. Anybody know how to get tender greens year round? I usually keep the white part of store bought scallions in a cup of water in the kitchen window to grow greens. These don't get as tough. For some reason this offends him, so I keep trying other things. I'll go get a picture of this onion plant.

  • 9 years ago

    I've had garlic do this. The wild garlic in the yard does it, too.

  • 9 years ago

    So 2 of these plants have done this and now the others have opened and they look like regular onion flowers. I'm going to try to "capture" these that are acting like walking onions and see what they do.

  • 9 years ago

    I have come to the conclusion that I must have stuck a walking onion bulb in the bed last year and that is what these plants were. The others are normal onion flowers, but these look just like the walking onions. This is good, because this is the permanent bed for perennial onions.

  • 9 years ago

    At least they are in the right place!

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