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Vancouver Washington

I was reading and article about saving seeds for your own use and thought I would share something about onion seeds I learned by accident. I am probably the last to learn this because I am posting on a gardening forum, but if you take an onion that you raised last year, one of those that has gotten old and has green showing, and bury it in your garden, a seed "pod" will grow up out of it. You can cut and store the seed pod in a paper bag over winter. When the pod is mature you can use the seeds for next years onions. You can tell when the seed pod is mature by looking at the "stalk", as it will slowly turn from green to brown. The seeds are best the first year, but will slowly lose their vigor over time. The seeds can be harvested by simply shaking the bag or they might just "be released" from the flowers. I think this is determined by the maturity of the pods. Sometimes more than one pod per onion. We start 50-75 seeds per one gallon pot in Feb. and have large, long storing onions. We "plant" many different varieties of last years onions so we have muliple seed pods. We dry the seed pods over winter in the same large paper bag so you never know what your going to get. We have done this with red, white, yellow, and sweet spanish onions for several years. Did'nt find a lot of info online when we started doing our own onions from seed so thought I would pass this along. We grow them under our t-5 lights that we use for pumpkins later in the season.

3/28/2021 10:38:01 AM

Grittyville, WA

Cool.

3/28/2021 6:00:05 PM