Thursday 12 January 2012

Unusual things from seed #2

With regards onions, I did save the seed from the one that decided to flower last year, and will try growing it this year. I've realised that the reason you don't see onion seed so much is just that us gardeners are impatient, and if you want really big onions, you need to sow them in august for harvesting the following year. However, Jon and I love our pickled onions, and these can be grown from seed in a year.

This year I'm planning on copying an idea I saw on a (my hero) Geoff Hamilton  series called The Ornamental Kitchem Garden: you plant about 6-7 seeds in a module in Jan/Feb indoors, and come about April you plant out the whole module together in one place. In theory the onions will push each other out of the way, and you will get a clump of medium-sized onions which looks like a massive aloe vera in the bed.

I reckon that growing them in this way is good for a container gardeners like us, and would give them a competitive advantage in a flowerbed as they're less likely to get smothered!

Onion varieties we're growing this year: Sturon, Ramrod, Paris silverskin and some miscellaneous red/white onion sets...

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