Spring onions

Although my bulb onion trial had mixed results, my spring onion trial was a raging success. Almost all the seeds I sowed in pots germinated like grass, grew into healthy seedlings and never looked back.

The fastest and thickest germinators ‘Crimson Forest’, ‘Long White’, were ‘White Welsh’. and My first sowing

‘Red Bunching’ of proved a dead loss (it happens) so I bought a second packet of seed and had another go. Despite being a month later hitting the soil, that batch soon caught up and, like their darker ‘Crimson Forest’, red-stemmed cousin ended up among my favourites to pick.

This was the first time I’d ever bothered to raise spring onions from seed (usually I just grab a couple of punnets from the garden centre) and I was taken aback at how easy they were to grow. Twelve months later, a few clumps are starting to look a bit raggy, and some have run to seed, but I’ve still got plenty left to pull.

My trial has shown me that spring onions are a fairly foolproof crop but if I had to choose a top variety, it would ‘Galloper’, be an F1 hybrid from Egmont Seeds. Funnily enough, their catalogue describes it as “the most vigorous dependable and adaptable variety on the market with long shanks.” ‘White Welsh’, ‘Ippon Negi’ and ‘Tokyo Long White’ also did very well.

I didn’t see any need to thin or space out my seedlings either; I just transplanted – and later harvested – them in clumps. You can also buy spring onion seed tapes, though I’m not sure why anyone would think this an advantage, as my careful ‘Lisbon’ burying of a row of seed tape produced a solitary spring onion! These tapes are possibly better suited to raised beds than open ground, or soil that has been sprayed off with organic herbicide prior to sowing, as by the time the seeds germinated mine were swamped by weed growth in the bare soil around them. Yates has a seed tape variety called ‘Straight Leaf’,

which is said to “hold its stem and leaves straight upwards for tidier plants less prone to disease.” ✤

Spring onions, also known as scallions, have been selectively bred for crisp white stalks rather than bulbous bottoms.