How To Plant Spring Onions
What a garden staple! I don’t think there’s ever a time when I don’t have them in my garden.
If you can let go of your garden looking perfect, I suggest you let a few of them mature and get big. They grow to around 50cm or 1 1/2 ft tall and then they flower. Now you can collect the seed from them of just let them fall and they we just come up again! That’s really true. Once they come up you can shift them if you want them in another spot but it really can be that easy……IF you let them go to seed.
To start with though, you’re either going to have to sow them from seed, or I really like the instantness of buying them already growing in a punnet.
If you look at them in the punnet you’ll see around 8 clumps of spring onions.
Now you can either plant them in 8 clumps, but gently pulling them out of the punnet and plonking the whole clump in a cute little hole in the garden. Just smoosh the soil gently back around them to sturdy them in the ground. By planting them this close together, the overall and eventual size of the spring onions will be smaller and better for salad sizes.
OR
You can separate that clump into individual spring onion plants. There can be anywhere from 8 - 20 individual spring onions in one clump in the punnet. This makes it really good value.
Now if you want to plant them individually, using your finger or the other end of the rake, make a little long trench in the soil so that you can come along and lay each spring onion plant on their side and so their roots are in the bottom of the trench. I put them a few centimetres apart and once all used up. You can use the rake to push the soil gently over all the roots and tamp them down. Water gently and in a day or two they will be upright and growing.
By planting them singularly, they will grow a lot bigger and this is a great way of getting the most out of them. They will easily be big enough to substitute for an onion in a dish if you don’t have onions.
IMPORTANT TIP:
Instead of pulling out each spring onion, snip off what you want to use at the base, just above the ground and it will re grow. Time and time again. I think my record is 9 re cuts of one plant. It is literally the plant that keeps on giving.
