Thursday, June 22, 2006

Egyptian Onion Fun



Last year, Karin (from Twin Cities Scrappers) gave me an Egyptian Onion bulb. I wasn't sure what to do with it, so I left it in the fridge for a while and then finally decided to put it in the garden. During the fall, it was beat up by my two young boys who love to dig in the garden once we have harvested everything. I thought for sure that the onion was a gonner until one day in early spring, I spot GREEN. Not just a normal green, but a blue green - distinctive to chives and onions. I was THRILLED. The onion had survived. I decided to transplant it (since we needed to prep the garden) and have enjoyed watching it change daily. Check it out:


I found a gardener's chat about it, too.

1) The entire onion is edible. We mostly use the green hollow leaves in late winter & spring in salads and as a substitute for green onions and chives. You can also eat the bulb part, but of course that destroys the plant. We find that if you cut off the 'flowering' stems and leaves down to soil level in mid-summer, new leaves will sprout. Otherwise, there's not much to eat after about July.2) I don't think it has much of a flower. Little bulblets form on the top of the stem where the flower should be. These grow until the weight of them cause the stem to bend or snap. When the cluster of bulblets touches the soil roots start to grow, forming a new clump away from the mother plant. In this way the onion can move around your garden, which leads to its other name: walking onion.
from: http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/forums/showthread.php?t=6269


Another article noted that if eating the stems, the ones that are young and without bulblets on them are the best.

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