An Intro to Walking Onions

These are some walking onions in the garden.

One of my recent fascinations has been growing tree onions, also known as Egyptian onions, topset onions, and tree onions. These unique plants form ordinary onion bulbs underground, but have onions on top instead of flowers. The bulbils (little onion bulbs) on top are used for propagation to easily increase plant numbers. The plants rarely set seed, and I was lucky enough to get two seedlings from my whole row of onions. The plants can have varying degrees of flowerlessness (which may not be a word, but should be) and that is what I plan on showing you today. I am not sure what causes some plants to have more flowers than others, but I want to try saving any seeds the plants produce, and growing out the seedlings to see what happens. I will go in order from flowers-a-plenty to massive bulbil production. As a warning, my posts will probably be very picture heavy, as this post will be!

This plant has tons of flowers, which is more than I have ever seen before.

This plant has many flower and a few small bulbils.

There are fewer flowers, but many small bulbils.

This onion has five medium sized bulbils.

Finally, a plant with three large bulbils.