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zxcvbob · 04-06-2010, 07:08 PM posted to rec.gardens.edible

wrote:

For green onions, I succession-plant those little white spherical
onions that are so ubiquitous on seed stands; I don't know what they're
called. At any rate, I plant them really closely together in containers
near other culinary herbs so that for most of the year (except for
mid-July through mid-Sept) DW and other interested neighboring cooks
have a ready supply of tender green shoots. I pull them ruthlessly as
they mature in order to use the space for tender new ones.

My grandmother used to have "multiplying onions" that never bloomed
and never went dormant -- this was in Houston, Texas. They looked
like scallions, but the taste was a little different. (I figured out
later that they taste like shallots.) They just kept dividing like
chives and the clump got bigger and bigger. You'd pull up a clump,
and break one off and replant it.

I've tried planting shallots and using them green. They taste right,
but they don't endlessly multiply. I wonder if day length has
anything to do with it? In Houston, the days never get much longer
than 14 hours, and up here they get well over 16 hrs long. Maybe what
she had was a long-day variety of "potato onion", or a confused shallot.

Bob