This spring I has some green onions that wintered over and grew impressively large. You don’t really get a very good perspective from this picture but the stems on these onions were about 4 feet tall. They developed beautiful flowering heads. I was very impressed with their showy desire to reproduce themselves, so I let a few of them stay to watch what would happen. The flower buds began to open and then the bees showed up.
I was surprise that the bees like the onions as much as they did. These flowers had a very strong onion scent. I’m not so sure I would like onion honey, but maybe on some herbed biscuits....it would be quite tasty. After the bees worked their pollenating magic, the flowers turned into little seed balls.
I watched those seed balls, as the weather got warmer, waiting for them to turned brown. When they did, I cut them off and let them sit in my house for a week, to dry out further, before harvesting the seed.
Each little seed ball had two to four small black seeds inside. I got over a 1/4 cup of onion seed from two of these flower heads. That should keep me in onions for years, at no cost! I can’t imagine how many seed packets this probably represents.
I planted some of the seed a few weeks ago to be sure that they were viable and they spouted. The original seed was organic and non-hybrid, so I’m fairly certain that these onions will grow normally.
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