Despite my energy level, I can be a lazy gardener. In the case of green onions, also known as scallions, this turned out to lead to a great discovery.
Freshly picked green onions are sweeter and crisper than those that have sat in the fridge for a few days. I generally only pick one or two at time—whatever I need for dinner that night.
Because green onions like cool weather, I leave them in the ground until just before it freezes. One fall I left them in the garden just a little too long. (Translation: I was too lazy to pick, wash, and properly store them.) The ground froze solid overnight and I couldn’t pick them. I wrote them off.
The following spring I noticed green shoots emerging in the green onion patch. I’m glad I left them to see what would happen.
From those shoots I picked good sized green onions weeks before I normally would have from spring-planted seeds here in Minnesota. Since I was experimenting with them anyway, I decided to leave some growing and see what would happen. I’m glad I did. Soon they grew flowers and seeds ripened. They re-seeded themselves and not long afterward I noticed baby green onions growing.
For the rest of the summer I left the small onions and picked the largest first, starting with the two-year-old ones. They were delicious even though their diameter was much larger than store-bought green onions.
That fall I dutifully covered the un-picked green onions. Not only did they survive and come up the following spring, but many self-sown seeds survived the winter and germinated in the cool, wet spring weather.
I kept my green onion patch going for four years, until I moved. In my garden right now I have green onions which I planted from seed last year. They’ve already flowered and I manually scattered their seeds before snipping off the dried flower heads. Hopefully some seeds will germinate this summer and some next spring. Just in case, I saved some seeds and plan to scatter them in the green onion patch in late fall.
The moral of the story? Sometimes it’s best to do nothing in the garden, because it could magically turn in to something. Like a perennial green onion patch.
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