- World onion production is estimated at roughly 105 billion pounds each year!
- That equates to just under 14 pounds of onions per person per year on planet earth!
- Just in the US, people eat about 20 pounds each per year. This is the equivalent of over 450 semi-trailer loads of onions per day!
Suffice to say that onions are pretty ubiquitous. In fact, onions are the third most important fresh vegetable crop on the planet. But where do they come from, who grows them, and how are they produced at such scale? You can be pretty sure they are grown in vast acreages in the usual monoculture fashion. A bit like this…
We at Seeds for Food would like to advocate a better way – a better way for both us and the community of life that surrounds us. That is why we are strong proponents of getting to know where your food comes from, and maybe even growing some of it for yourself. Getting intimate – up close and personal, so to speak. The upshot of this approach is that we cannot help but come to re-establish relationship with our food. Food ceases to be an abstract commodity. And we start to care. That’s a good thing!
This post is actually about growing onions and producing onion seed at a small, human scale. So let’s get on to sharing that process with you today at Seeds for Food.
Onions are allium crops belonging to the same family as leeks, chives, garlic, and other lesser-knowns. They are biennials, meaning they take two full years to complete their life cycle – from seed to bulb and back to seed again. Here in our temperate, high-latitude climate we have to sow our onions seeds early in spring to have enough time to produce vigorous, large and healthy bulbs. Onion seedlings look like this.
But wait! If we want to go on to produce seeds the following year with our onions, we have to engage in a bit of esoteric alchemy starting at this point. We not only have to “cure” the onions to ensure their successful storage for eating purposes throughout winter, we have to select the very best, and enough of them, as candidates for seed production next spring.
That’s where the fun begins! One of the primary considerations in producing seeds is to select the very best, most “true-to-type” specimens for seed production the following year. This means conformity to varietal description, (what are they supposed to look like?), absence of disease (both growing in the field and later in storage) etc.
But what does “true-to-type” really mean? We can consult seed catalogues for that information and acquire a general sense of what varietal characteristics the variety is known for, like this:
“Rossa di Milano Onion - OPEN-POLLINATED Specialty onion with sweet flavor, good yield and long storage potential. The moment we saw it in our trials, with high shoulders and shimmering pink skins, it stole our hearts. Broad onions with a rounded, tapering heart shape. Plants are very productive and store well. A standout OP! Long to intermediate day · Stores well · 4" bulbs (Allium cepa) Days to maturity: 110 days”
But the best way to determine what the variety should look like and what traits it exhibits is to grow it for a few seasons and become familiar with it. We have grown Rossa di Milano, an open-pollinated heirloom red storage onion from Italy for many seasons, and we have concluded that it is an excellent onion worthy of both growing and producing seeds from.
So, at his time of year in March we rummage through our stored and selected onions from last fall, which we have kept safely in cool, dry conditions over the winter. Here are some of our onion sacks after emerging from storage.
That's pretty much it in terms of bulb selection. Although we started off with approximately 25 pounds of onions that made it through the winter, we were left with only 60-70 that we will allow to go on and produce seed, which is not quite as many as we hoped. Soon -as weather allows - they will be planted out in their permanent growing beds for the season. If all goes well, we can expect an onion seed harvest sometime in August, provided the gods are willing!