How to Grow Scallions ( Bunching, Spring, & Green Onions ) - Seed to Kitchen!

today we'll take a closer look at how to grow scallions sometimes we call these green onions or bunching onions - along with some other names and we'll cover those in just a minute so all of the following footage was taken from my personal gardens over the past four years most of the video is going to be spent on how to get your onions growing so I will show you how to grow them from seed from transplants from just cutting them and also letting them recede in your garden we will also look at watering and feeding problems and pests how and when to harvest and ways that you can use them in your kitchen you can get your scallions growing in many different ways we can start our seeds indoors and then Transplant them outdoors we can also sow the seeds outdoors directly into the soil we can start our onions from cuttings so that you don't have to plant them from seed we can also let them recede naturally in your garden so scallions or green onions are often referred to also as bunching onions salad onions or spring onions spring onion is often used differently depending on where you live sometimes the spring onion is referred to an onion which is meant to form a bulb but it's just harvested early so that does not form the ball but it looks very similar and is used as a scallion so whenever I start to plant my vegetable and herb seeds I like to refer to the all new square foot gardening book to get me going and in the back of the book there are some excellent charts to help you along these charts will refer to your frost dates if you don't know your frost dates I will leave them in the description area below the video and the Farmers Almanac website is an excellent resource to find out your frost dates so according to this chart and also a chart that I can pick up from my local County Extension Office I know that I can get my onions started indoors or outdoors between the months of February and April so I like to start my scallion indoors in late January early February I would like to grow the Evergreen long white bunching onions I also found online that this particular onion has been known to survive winters as low as negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit so it's very winter hardy so let's take a closer look at temperatures so here are the germination times and temperatures for onion seeds for instance if you were to sow your seeds when your soil temperature is around 50 degrees Fahrenheit you can expect for 98% of the seeds that you put in the soil to germinate in 13 days let's go on down the chart a little bit here and we noticed that at 68 degrees Fahrenheit 99% will germinate in 5 days so this is a very good soil temperature for your onion seed to germinate and then if we go down a little bit further and once you get into the very hot temperatures you'll notice there's a great drop-off in the rate of germination so this is a chart that you will need to adapt to wherever it is you leav ok I know in my climate that I can my soil temperature is nice and around 68 degrees Fahrenheit on up to around 86 degrees Fahrenheit from let's say around May to June and then it starts to get pretty hot there in July so use this information so that you can find out when is the best time for you to get your seeds started so once a year and that would be as I mentioned in January and early February I will start my seeds indoors we keep our temperature at around 70 degrees and dwars and I'll just use a plastic cup I might drill holes in the cup I might use an ice pick and poke holes in the bottom of the cup but some way you need to make sure you have drainage in your cup and will use a seed starting mix I always like to use a seed starting mix and so I'm simply just going to fill the cup up and we'll moisten the soil I like to put a another cup underneath it which does not have holes so that it will catch some of the water whenever I water the onions and I'll just sprinkle out some seed I have read that onion seed is really only good for a year so I'm know that I've experienced that myself but I do try to always use fresh onion seed so I like to put it in mo in dough seal after I've covered it up with just a little bit of soil and I'll keep them misted until they germinate and then I'll just water them and keeping them going to sell in about late February maybe early March I will start to move them outdoors where they get constant sunlight and this is what's known as hardening off I'm just trying to get them acclimated to a new climate so it's going to be actually much cooler outdoors than it is inside my house and the onions do not mind cooler temperature so only if it's going to snow or something like that while I move them indoors because they're still kind of young and I don't want to expose them to something too harsh but most of the time I slowly will move them out maybe the first day for a couple hours and the second day for maybe all day and pretty much they will stay outside until I'm able to transplant them into a container so now it's time to transplant them into a container this is an early March and I'll just take some compost and I'll go ahead and mix that lightly into the soil and I want to make sure it's nice and loose the soil needs to be loose and a good potting mix so that it has adequate drainage I will wet the soil nicely and you see how this water just drains beautifully through this soil this is very important you notice that it's not real compacted and there's no puddling on top of the soil so now I can separate out my onions and this is a rather tedious process and this is not my favorite project of the year but I do like to get a jump start on the season and that's the only reason why I'm doing this I start onions early and I also start parsley early so now I'm just going to separate them a lot of people like to give it a haircut in other words are going they trim off the top of their onions and just to kind of make it easier to do this but this is fine for me I don't really have a problem with it you can also soak it in water and this will help remove some of the soil and just make it easier to separate so with a skewer or a nice pick I like to just make a straight hole down into the soil and we'll just compress the soil around it the nice moist soil and we want to make sure the roots have good contact so I usually like to just hold the leaves straight up and then force the roots down into the soil I don't want to force them down too deep but just in between two fingers seems to do the trick and so they'll basically look something like this once I've got them all done that takes me about 30 minutes and it won't be long I'm just a few weeks later they will root down and they'll be upright and then on the outside I noticed there are some leaves which are browning and falling off and that's fine that just tells me that the onion is actually rooting down now off to the right I had also started some seeds outdoors directly into the container and that's so that when I've used up this supply of scallions these will be ready to harvest so let's go ahead and I'll show you how to plant these from seed so again we're just going to make sure this the soil is nice and loose so I'll go ahead and use my favorite seeds these are very easy to find and we'll just sprinkle some out onto the surface so on the other side of the pot on planting cilantro and I'm just going to go ahead and water all of these in I didn't really need to sprinkle soil on top of the onion seeds because the water is going to force the seed down into the soil because the soil is loose and it's not compacted so just a few weeks later they are up and we had received a lot of rain I kept them moist also i misted them regularly and that's what you'll need to do to get the seeds going if it's dry your seeds are not just going to come up unless you're having a lot of rain so make sure that you keep them misted and I'm pretty much we'll just sprinkle out some scallion seeds all through my container garden you'll find them growing just about anywhere with nasturtiums and basil and parsley and everything now down in my other garden in my raised bed I also plant them behind each other so you'll notice here in the front I had some growing well behind them I'm also going to plant some more just sprinkling them high from up of and then I will cover these with just a tiny bit of soil and water those in as well now another way that some people like to grow scallions and it's kind of fun for the kids you can keep a little root end of your green onions put them in water and they will regrow the green part and then you can put them in soil I don't grow them this way for my consumption because I like to use the white tip that's my probably my favorite part of the scallion so but this is something kind of fun and if you like using most of the green tips well there you go there's an easy way for you to grow scallions for the green leaves okay now the fourth way that we can get our onions growing is maybe you have a garden and you grab us your things directly into the ground you may just want to let it go and recede or of course you can do that in a raised bed too but I use my raised beds and my containers for more controlled plantings this year I am starting a garden where I'll just let things recede on their own so an onion these white bunching onions that particular seed that I showed you you can just let it flower and once that dries you can break it off and just throw it into the ground and they will reseed that way and that's a real easy and a way to grow your onions you can expect for your onions to form a flower like this once they have really over matured past the point of where you would want to use them and for most people that will happen into the second growing season but again it depends on your climate a lot of times well actually even when I lived in Florida I live there was very hot mine would bolt within the first year so I would notice flowers on my scallions there my first year so I'm just know that that little flower can give you more onions the following year of course that if it does again depend on your climate so now let's take a look at watering and feeding your scallions once they have started to come up you'll want to just gently miss them with water and just keep doing this so that they don't dry out this is a very critical stage of germination especially as you start to get into those summer months there really works really hot you want to make sure that you keep them watered I also like to use just a very small like a child's watering can and water directly at the base of my onions and I basically just feed it because I grow these in containers I'll feed them just water-soluble fertilizer about every 10 days so I don't have many pests or diseases with the scallions at all I've only had one that I can personally remember and it was the onion aphid so here is a picture of what onion aphids look like and it took me a while to figure out that I was even having a problem with these onions but I ended up just pulling them out and I didn't use them because they were so unhealthy by the time I noticed there was a problem there's also the onion fly maggot this is a picture of what you might find inside the leaf of an onion and the fly just lays its eggs there and then they burrow down into the onion leaves and can destroy your onions that way but those are two things like I said I haven't had a problem with the onion fly maggot now a third problem you may have is inconsistent watering I noticed that one time I went on vacation for about a week we experienced a lot of rain while I was gone and the onions took up a lot of water so the top started falling over they actually grew a lot more too and so they were a little over mature for me they're still edible and I still ended up using the bottom portions but the top of the leaves were just too had too much water in them and they weren't good and I'll show you that later in the video have this can look now the of course in consistent watering also means not enough water so a lot of times your onions can dry out especially if they've just germinated and they're starting to come up they've not if they're not receiving the water like from rain or are you misting them they will dry up and just shrivel up and go away now this is an example where to survive they they did find I do know that if it's really hot and dry your scallions will dry up so make sure you keep them watered now the fun part we get to harvest them and scallions can be harvested anywhere between 60 and 100 days of growth I like them closer to the 60 to 70 day mark they're nice and crisp they're small or not overgrown the leaves are usually still crisp and they're not over like soft and slimy what I like to call them a lot of times we'll just grab them at the very base and you can pull the whole thing up now I'll go ahead and let you know too that if you don't want to use the white tips you can just cut these off cut off the green part and they'll regrow but personally for me my favorite part is the white tip so that's the part I go for so just grab it at the base and pull it up and that's how you harvest it now if they're really mature maybe they have gotten closer to that 100 day mark you'll want to ease them up slowly so that the white tip doesn't stay below okay and that's like I said because that's the part I like to use so just remove those outer leaves that are dead and they'll be beautiful now this is around 70 days here this was actually the planting idea for you earlier in the video this is how they look this is the my perfect time to harvest them and after I harvest them I just like to cut the roots off and I'll put them in some water on my windowsill because I generally harvest them the day I'm going to use them you can also wash them and put them in the refrigerator if you plan to use them maybe within the week or something now let's take a look at how we're going to use them in the kitchen so I always cut off the little tip the little root tip and like I showed you earlier you can just regrow that if you want scrape fun for the kids and then I'm going to just on a very gentle diagonal angle here I'm going to go ahead and slice them I like to slice up to about right when you start to get into the green part of the green onion slicing them diagonally like that makes it a lot easier to separate them into little rings so that you can put them on all of your dishes of course it's just a personal preference whether or not you want to go all the way up and use the entire green part of your scallion that's a like I said a personal preference I'll show you here the reason why I don't always go all the way up the leaf here and it's because sometimes if there's been like maybe a lot of rain or something the end of those onions will be slimy and they'll have a lot of water in them Fran you hear as I cut into the top portion here right here you see there's some liquid coming out and that's why I don't always like to use the top portion and this is the part I really like right here so this is nice and crisp and so again I'll just go ahead and cut off the root tip and now I have a nice the white part the light green part and then some of the dark green part and there's just a lot of different variations of flavor here too and I probably use these more than just about any other herb that I grow I like mainly because it's just so easy to grow for instance them just a few weeks ago I cut some this was a little bit more mature than I preferred but I went ahead and cut those up and I put them on some sliders along with my first tomato that I'd harvested for the season so there's a little turkey sliders there they're really good and just about anything that you're cooking this Asian related like this is an Asian coleslaw and some fish just by going to talk of a flour tortilla or something like that and then of course for all the moms out there make sure that you cook a lot of chili whenever you make your next pot of chili and the next day you can just toast some bread and then warm that chili up and put it on top of your toes and then put some cheese on top of there and broil that cheese down onto the chili so it melts nicely and then sprinkle it with some green onions it's really good and it's a very fast and family-friendly meal so my kids love that so that's my next day leftover chili dish and of course green onions are good with beans and rice we eat a lot of rice and beans in my house they're good on eggs here are just some eggs cooked with salsa with a little bit of cilantro and green onion and then some coconut milk soup that's one of my favorite soups a little bit of lime some cilantro and the green onion of course and then just some chicken burritos a lot green onion and cilantro on there also some Cajun red beans and rice another family favorite and who doesn't like wings this isn't Thai sticky wings and they're real good on that also shrimp and grits for you southerners out there will good old plate of southern shrimp and grits and sometimes I will also slice these lengthwise and that's perfect for spring basil rolls so I mentioned earlier about spring onions so I'll talk briefly here about spring onions this is an example of where I have a scallion and then I have a spring onion this is actually called a Red Baron onion and if you harvest it early before it actually forms a bulb then you can use it as a scallion and we also like I said called us spring onion you can just pop them on your grill and some for instance here I was I grilled them and then I chopped them up and I put them on steak sandwiches that we had grilled and that was great so for all these recipes you're welcome to head on over to my channel and click on playlists and there you will find a complete playlist with all of these recipes for spring onions and I'm always adding to it as well so for more of these complete and thorough videos that I've taken from my personal gardens over the past several years you're welcome to head over to my channel where you can check those out remember always my videos have the rainbow in the bottom corner so you will know you're watching my videos and not someone elses thank you so much for watching and y'all have a beautiful day

Channel: Rainbow Gardens

Views: 188,278

Keywords: garden, cooking, culinary, raised bed, square foot garden, how to grow scallions, how to grow bunching onions, how to grow green onions, how to grow spring onions, how to grow salad onions, container gardeing, how to grow onions in a container, how to grow onions, how to grow herbs in containers, how to grow herbs, how to grow herbs from seed, how to make a herb garden, container garden, how to grow vegetables from seed, complete growing guide

Id: V3ThJQgpClo

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2016