Green Onions

We've been eating fresh green onions from the garden! It's so exciting to make that little walk down to the garden and cut a fresh onion for my salad.  I also have chives up and have been cutting them as well.  I don't buy green onions during the winter because they are usually so expensive that I can't justify spending money on something I  know we'll have ten months of the year. 

I grow something called 'walking' onions.  I've seen it in garden catalogs as egyptian walking onions.  I don't know if they came from egypt but around here, we call them walking onions.  My mom gave me a start several years ago and she was given a start from someone at church.  That's sometimes the best plant, a pass-along plant.  When she passed these along, the directions were like this....'plant them like a regular onion but don't ever pull the entire onion.  Just cut them down to the ground and they will resprout over and over.'  Just like that, they do!  Mid-summer, they send up a very thick flower stalk and bloom like a chive.  Once the bloom is over, the little flower becomes many little onions that will drop off and replant themselves. 

They were so proficient at my house that last year I dug up a bucket full and sent them with my husband to work.  They were eager to try them.  I really like them because once you put in a place, they stay and you  never have to replant!  The perfect recycling plant! Each spring, very early I might add, you can go out and start cutting.  It seems those onions like to be cut, the more cutting the faster they seem to grow.  I throw out a little vegetable food every spring just to help them out a bit, but they pretty much are plants that don't require anything. 

I love those kind of plants!  I take my grandma's mantra concerning plants.  I asked her one time how all her plants always looked so good,.....she said, 'I only grow the ones that will grow!'  Pretty profound really, she didn't believe in wasting time here in Oklahoma trying to coax plants that didn't do well to grow.  She knew what grew well and she grew a lot of each.  That's why her garden did so well!  My mom and both my grandma's had green thumbs and they all pretty much do that...grow what grows well.  Plus, they take a bit of a hand's off approach.  They didn't hover over....it either lived or died. 

I like that garden mantra, I have too many other things to worry about than green onions.  I need them to grow well on their own.  I like my 'walking' onions!