I am not well this week – Pete brought back some lurgy or other from a recent road trip and thoughtfully passed it on to me. It has been nearly a week since I was last outside, making my new herb bed. I am feeling slightly better today and might venture out to collect some of the bulbils that have formed on my Welsh onions.
I still don’t know why these plants have formed bulbils while the others formed the more familiar allium seedheads. It’s a big mystery.
The only suggestions have come from Alison Tindale, of the new perennial edibles nursery ‘Back Yard Larder’. She doesn’t have a website yet, but you can email her if you’d like to know what she’s got in stock. I bought a plant from her a couple of weeks ago, and it’s an exciting one, so I must go out and take a photo of it before I blog it.
Anyway, this is what Alison has discovered:
“I knew I’d read some strange things about the onion family but when I went searching again it turned out to be about potato onions: plant a big one and it will split, plant a small one and it will grow into a bigger one.
But then I found on Google books “Onions and other vegetable alliums“ by James L. Brewster (p147). Looks like, at least in ‘normal’ onions, Allium cepa, a period of warmth can encourage bulbils to form and the stage of flower formation that has been reached when the warm period occurs affects what form these take and whether it affects the whole flower head. Is it possible one lot of your Welsh onions have got a lot warmer than the others?
As you’re keen on perennials you might like this great article too, about growing garlic as a perennial.”
In fact, it was Alison’s email that reminded me I’d read something about growing garlic as a perennial before, and prompted me to post Sam’s lovely article about Everlasting Garlic, which is well worth a read if you’ve got a couple of minutes.