HOW TO GROW SPRING ONIONS OR GREEN ONIONS

A spring onion or green onion variety that's mellow in flavor and one of the easiest to grow let's look at growing the crystal wax white onions so here are the seeds for this onion variety and the reason they're called spring onions is because we usually plant them in fall for a spring harvest so as you can see here we've sowed our seeds in this seed starting container and by September the seedling should have grown large enough that they are ready for transplanting on to raised beds or containers so around mid-september what we can do as we can look at our plants and if they're healthy enough or if they've grown to about this size that you see here its ready to be transplanted so let's transplant these onion seedlings on raised beds now if you want spring onions that are smaller in size that have smaller bulbs plant them very close about an inch away from each other however I'm gonna be planting my spring onions about three to four inches apart and the reason for doing that I'm not only going to use these onions as spring onions I'm gonna let some of these bulbs mature into bigger onions and if I can get slightly bigger onions from some of these plants I can use these onions just like a regular onions as well now how does a spring onion green onion differ from a regular onion well it's the same plant the only reason we call them spring onions in some countries and green onions in some countries is that these onions are usually eaten before they reach full maturity so they have smaller bulbs rather they're harvested when they have smaller bulbs and they're usually eaten whole the onion bulb the stem and the leaves as well so these onions these spring onions have a more mellow flavor they taste a lot milder than regular onions and that is why these onions are called spring onions just because of the way they're harvested and eaten now the name spring comes from the fact that these onions are usually harvested during springtime so as you can see here these onions that we're planting will grow through late fall which is the months of October November and December and that's the time they will be ready for harvest and it usually takes about 60 to 90 days for this onion variety to mature now I've mixed in a lot of compost and some organic fertilizer into the soil and that should be enough nutrition for these onion seedlings grow a little larger so what you need to do is add this kind of a fertilizer during planting and then wait for about two months and here in the month of december can see that the onion seedlings have now gone pretty large and this is the time when you need to start adding fertilizer I prefer using a liquid fertilizer every three weeks I use a fish/seaweed emulsion mix that I use and it works great for these onion plans you have a lot of options though you can use a vegetable fertilizer just use any fertilizer that meant for tomatoes or peppers they work great for onions and you can even use slow release fertilizers which you can apply every three to four weeks now here you can see that in the month of december late December the onion seedlings are almost ready for harvest you can actually start harvesting them anytime you want and in February you can see that these onions have grown large enough to be harvested and eaten as spring onions or green onions and they won't have large bulbs that's not the idea of growing these onions these onions are grown so that they can can form smaller bulbs but are very delicious when eaten raw you can eat the bulbs, you can eat the stems you can even chop the leaves eat them raw you can add them to stir-fries that's the whole idea of growing spring onions and if you leave these onions to mature for a longer time they can still be eaten their bulbs will be a little larger than what you see here so let's go to harvest a couple more of these onion variety and here you can see that the bulbs have started growing larger and each month that you wait until spring these bulbs will keep getting larger so you can not only use these onions and spring onions you can just eat them as regular onions and they have a very nice mellow flavor to them so as you can see very easy to grow in your home garden now sometimes you might see that when you're growing your onions the temperatures go up and the onion plants send out these escapes or these flowers what you can do is just snip these flowers off from the plant and as a result what happens is that the plant concentrates its energy in producing bulbs rather than these flowers and these scapes are perfectly edible you can use them just like you would use a spring or green onions