We grow two types of perennial onions at our dacha: Welsh onions and chives. We also plant onion sets every spring.
Welsh onion
Welsh onions appear early in the spring, as soon as the snow melts and the sun warms them slightly. They grow quickly and produce juicy, delicious greens. While young, the greens are soft, but over time, the greens mature and become tough.
The value of the Welsh greens is that they're the earliest-ripening vegetables, rich in vitamins. We add them to salads and love them in pies with onions and eggs.
When it produces flower stalks, I leave them; it blooms beautifully with large white balls, but when it finishes blooming, I cut them off so that the onion doesn’t scatter its seeds all over the garden.
I leave the best flower stalk alone, letting it ripen into seeds. The ripe seeds fall off, and soon thin shoots appear, growing very quickly.
Chives
Chives, also known as skoroda, have thin, delicate, dark-green leaves and are also edible. If cut for greens, they grow back very quickly.
Here, it grows primarily as an ornamental onion; its lilac flowers are very pretty and bees love them. The flowers, like the tops, are added to salads.
This onion can also repel pests; if you plant it next to carrots, the carrot fly will avoid the carrot bed, and it also protects cabbage from the cabbage white butterfly.
Onion sets
We plant onion sets in May, when the soil has warmed up sufficiently. This year I'll be growing three varieties: Red Baron, Stuttgarter Riesen, and Sturon.
The Red Baron variety is red in colour and has a semi-sharp taste, is resistant to bolting and ripens in 70 days.
Stuttgarter Riesen - bulbs are round, golden in color, have a spicy taste, ripening period is 90 days.
This will be my first time planting Sturon. I usually buy Centurion, but it was out of stock this time. It's an early variety, ripening in 65 days, with a sharp flavor. The onion sets are similar in appearance to Centurion, with long, elongated bulbs that are light golden in color.
I bought the onions in advance and warmed them up in a warm place under a radiator. I hope that my onions won't bolt, but will grow large and healthy.
I sorted through the onion sets, removed the soft and dry ones, and separated them by size—large, medium, and small. I read that onions about 3 cm in diameter produce the best harvest. I'll plant the large and medium onions in a bed, and the small ones—some near the blackcurrant bushes—will repel bud mites, and some in the carrot beds to protect against carrot fly.
In the fall, I'll also collect the small bulbs, dry them, and grow them on the windowsill for greens over the winter. I do this every year; I have green onions growing all winter long.
I cut off the top part of the neck so that my onion would sprout faster, and slightly removed some of the husk.
I soaked it in hot 40 degree salt water for an hour (1 tablespoon of salt per 1 liter of water) to stimulate growth and to prevent the formation of bolts and nematodes, rinsed it in clean water, then kept it in a solution of phytosporin for diseases for 2 hours, and rinsed it again.
I prepared the bed in advance, added compost and ash, dug it up, and watered the bed with a solution of phytosporin.
I decided to use another method to combat onion flies. Before planting, I diluted 1 tablespoon of birch tar in 1 liter of water and soaked the onions for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Tar has an unpleasant odor, and the flies won't bother eating them.
I made furrows, laid out the onions, and lightly covered them with soil. There will be carrot beds nearby. Onions and carrots protect each other from onion and carrot flies.
I'll wait for the first shoots.
Leek
This year we planted leeks, or pearl onions, for the first time. A neighbor at our dacha regularly grows them from seedlings and shared hers with us.
We prepared a ditch in a sunny spot and planted thin thread-like sprouts.
We covered it with covering material for the first time so that the onions could get stronger.
It's hard to believe that such tiny seedlings grow into strong and tall leek bushes.