How to Grow Spring Onions (aka Scallions/Salad Onions) || Spring Onions from Seed || Plot 37

yeah what i'm going to talk about today is growing spring onions because i absolutely love spring onions and i've got to sew some this morning so i thought that's convenient i'll talk about that i was supposed to be doing a plot tour this morning but it is blowing a gale outside and torrential rain and i didn't really fancy it to be honest uh it's absolutely atrocious weather out there and my whole instagram feed is just full of terrible tragic stories of polytunnels being blown away and poles snapped and all that kind of stuff so i really hope you haven't received too much damage in your gardens because to be honest i was at work all day yesterday and i'm not used to working a friday see thought i had a whole day before i had to put this video out so it was all a bit of a kerfuffle but it does mean that i haven't actually gone up to the allotment yet to just check if we've got any damage so i'm really hoping that uh everything's all right up there but i'm going up there this afternoon to film for the vlog so uh you'll see on tuesday if there was any damage so spring onions are one of the easiest things you can grow they are just problem free basically okay my absolute favorite variety of spring onions and i do go quite a few of them is a variety called lilia so i bought this about a month ago at garden center and i picked it and i knew it says lilia on it but the picture is not a villia it's of apache and all the information on the back is about a shallot variety called lorient so i mean i'm really hoping the seed in there is lilia but you never know so thanks for that thompson and morgan you've got a right mishmash of things on this one but generally the one that you're going to see me planting and doing various bits to throughout the year is this variety called lilia because it's my favorite but every year i also grow a variety called white lisbon which is just a straight white one and this year i'm also doing performer performers got a bit more of a roundy bottom than lilia and white lisbon so that should be nice but i like to have a mixture of white and red so i'd say there's probably four main routes that you could kind of go down for growing spring onions so the first way to do them is what i'm going to be doing this morning which is just sewing them straight into a seed tray so i'm just going to use a mix of kind of the standard potting compost i've been using and vermiculite to pop this on i'm just going to cover up that man's face because i don't want him to be looking at me and yeah that's all i'm using just gonna squash it in here normally i would use another one of the same pot to squash it down rather than my fingers which makes it a bit more even but i don't have any with me they're all up at the plot so fingers it is this compost is quite dry so i'm going to give it a water before i sow the seeds so here's the packet i'm really hoping that the little sachet inside of the seeds on actually says lilia on it because otherwise who knows what we've got so andy does excellent we are lillian yep so i'm going to sprinkle these across the top of this now damp compost about half the packet because i'm going to be planting these out or taking them out of this pot they can be sewn really quite thickly quick sprinkling of soil over the top we can uncover this man's face i hope youtube doesn't count this is advertising me having the waitrose weekend special magazine underneath my potting i am not sponsored by waitrose and just water that in and we're done and when they all come up they will look like this so these ones i will leave probably another couple of weeks maybe before i plant them out but once they are ready to plant out this is what i'll do with them so when i take these out if they're quite sparsely planted in there you can kind of be a bit more delicate and scoop them out like that trying to keep the soil around the bottom and their roots but really spring onions are tough enough for you just be able to do this which is just turn them out on their side and pull them apart the only thing you've got to watch when you're doing this is to make sure that both the spring onions themselves have been watered in the soil they're coming out of and the soil they're being planted into is really really wet other than that you can't go wrong so the other way you can sew them rather than in an open tray like this one is is sowing them into seed cells where you plant sort of five six maybe in each cell of a seed tray and you just plant them out straight like that alex from the essex allotment has very kindly sent me some footage of him and his multi-sewn spring onions in the seed tray from earlier this year you can see here he's sewn just a pinch of seed in each one of these cells so there's a clump of spring onions growing in each one and he's growing for csa veg box so he's doing on a scale much much larger than i am that scale labor saving is really important when you plant out clumps like this you get competition within the group and you are picking each one as it's becoming ready which kind of gives you an inbuilt successional sewing type system which is brilliant for space saving and time saving thanks alex i really appreciate that so another way of sewing them is just to direct sew them straight into the soil so i've already hosed down the soil so it is pretty soggy already before i sew into it and i'm just going to mark out my drills you can do narrow drills like this or you can do a wide drill it doesn't really matter i'm just going to do two narrow ones this clip is from earlier in the summer and you can see i was sewing lilia then can you see how different a shape that picture is than the ones on the other packet yeah totally different onion and spring onion seed etc is all quite coarse which makes them really quite easy to just pinch so because if seed is really really fine it can be very difficult to do that way but onion seed works great and then it's just a case of taking a pinch and running them up these drills i'm sewing pretty thinly because these ones are not going to be moving they're going to stay in place so a bit like how alex's were competing in their bunches these are going to be competing in their rows [Music] i kind of split this into two because i really like a neat straight line okay so yes i do grow vegetables to eat them honestly i do it's not just an exercise and enjoying myself but my other method is rather than just direct sew so if you direct so and you sew them relatively thinly you just leave them there that it's as simple as that you leave them there they germinate they become spring onions you pick them out bit like with alex's where he's multi-sewn them in those cells he's plonked them in the ground instead of five or six in a group and they will compete with each other so you get one gets big much faster you pick that one you know how it goes and it's the same when you just direct so straight into the ground sew them thinly and you pick them as each one becomes ready something i really like to do which is really like an old-fashioned way of doing things you don't see people using seed beds that often anymore and it is a bit labour intensive but it's a process that i really enjoy doing so when i direct so into the ground i will direct so some which i'm just going to leave there particularly with onions i don't tend to move them around but with spring onions i sew them really thickly like a hedge of spring onions straight into the seed bed and i let them come up until they're a reasonable size and then i just hoik them all out and any that really aren't any good i just leave alone and all the rest of them i plan out in nice neat rows so these two rows here are they're sewn so thickly that the spring onions wouldn't really compete well enough to kind of produce anything so i'm just giving them a really good soak and then i'm just pulling them out in clumps you can see they don't look that close actually from above but when i'm pulling them out you can see like how thick the clumps are so i'm just going to take these out and transfer them into another bed there's masses of them that's just me pulling them out i haven't cleaned the soil off them or anything that's how dense they were so once again it's pre-water the soil and get planting this is like meditation i'm telling you [Music] and yes i have been taking the piss out for doing this i find it a really enjoyable experience i like having them in rows i like planting out seedlings and i love it you can also do this if you accidentally like really over sow your spring onions and your direct so so if you've kind of done your line and kind of got a bit you know heavy-handed with the seed and they come up just like a hedge and then they're not they're too close to actually mature into proper spring onions you can just wake them out or hold them out in bits you know and transplant them spring onions transplant no problem so i tend to use a combination of all of these methods i don't just go for one and it depends on the time of the year so my first sewing for spring onions is always early january every year so yes they're really slow growing to begin with because of light levels and temperature even if they're inside but that first sewing i like to get going january i tend to sew more spring onions about every three weeks throughout the first half of the year but that first sewing because it's going to start off so slowly there's not really any need to plant them to kind of three weeks later because they're going to catch up with each other so i tend to do one early january and then like the ones that i've done today are my second indoor sewing early march my next sewing will be in three weeks time so kind of very beginning of april sort of time and that will be my first sewing outside and then from then on all of my outdoor sewings will be every three weeks maybe every month depending on how many spring onions you eat and that will carry on until july maybe august depending on the weather and then i'll take a gap and then around mid-october i will sew another set and keep them going until it would be when do i normally plant them out about mid-november and i plant them into the polytunnel and they will sit there not doing a great deal until early spring so the ones that i planted in november last year are just starting to come into their own now and i'll be picking them in a couple of weeks time so you can kind of get this rollover growing as you go when i sew in january so these guys my first pickings of them will be around the beginning of may so take a bit of time particularly when you start them so early in the year they take a bit of time to get going but once we get into the warmer weather they start speeding up so you won't be waiting like four months for them they'll be coming much much faster okay problems you can encounter actually spring onions are pretty problem free so generally with alliums and most of us have to cover our alliums with some kind of mesh to stop the allium leaf miner getting in but actually with spring onions you can get away with it because they're in the ground for such a short amount of time that the allium leaf miner doesn't really have a chance to get hold and it's not that much of an issue i get allium leaf miner two different degrees every year on my longer leaks so not i've talked to you before about nipper which is a really short-term leak don't get problems with that but any of the longer-term leaks the muscle brews and the lincoln's and all that kind of stuff i always get lm leaf miner it's not always disastrous and it's not um it's not always like a right off of the crop or anything but even when they're covered i do tend to get a little bit of it in there with spring onions i very rarely cover them and i've never had a problem because they're just not in the ground long enough another thing which often affects alliums is rust and i have had occasionally a little bit of rust on the leaves of my spring onions but again they're just not in the ground long enough they're such a quick crop that they're not hanging around enough time to really get any major problems something that can happen is that they can rot off in the soil if the soil is really really soggy that they really don't like having their feet like soaking wet and that's it really i mean they're so easy and so beautiful particularly lilia but they all are wonderful and they are so versatile in the kitchen so obviously raw spring onions on salads on top of curries any of that kind of thing brilliant but they're also fantastic cooked they're great in stir fries and that sort of thing they're also really wonderful just top and tailed and stuck on the barbecue so they get a bit char grilled and the outside layer kind of seals in the moisture and they cook on the inside they're also really great if you just again top and tail them keep them whole put them in a pan with a tiny bit of stock and some butter and just let them wilt down into that oh yeah really really good and if you leave them in the ground that little bit longer they do actually form a head at the bottom like you know like a small onion and they make probably the finest pickled onions particularly lilia makes the finest pickled onions known to mankind they do also freeze like the leeks i don't know if you remember one of the vlogs i did before i was saving my leaks for the winter which was just chopping them up washing them out and freezing them spring onions freeze absolutely fine so even if you do end up growing about like five beds of them like i do you can store them for the winter and they work beautifully okay and that's how to grow spring onions so wish me luck i'm gonna go and head up to the allotment now and uh do a bit of filming for the vlog and talking of vlogs i will see you on tuesday see you later chaps and there's loads of different ways you can do them

Channel: Jessie at Plot 37

Views: 33,312

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Id: HTzh2ZvmycQ

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021