Infinite Green Onions

Here’s a handy little tip. I’m pretty sure I heard it first from Mr. Jack Spirko:

Save the root ends of your green onions (aka scallions) — the parts you cut off when you’re cooking. Plant those, roots down, under about an inch of soil and they will generate new green onions. Keep this cycle going throughout your growing season and you should have an endless supply of green onions for your table. It’s much easier than starting from seed!

Green onions are shallow rooted, so work very well in pots. Also, they’re so unobtrusive and easy to grow that you can just tuck them here and there in your garden–anywhere that gets water–and forget about them until you need them.

Happy growing!

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17 Comments

  1. I did the same thing with the end of a head of celery, only there don’t have to be roots to do it. I just set the celery end in a saucer of water until I could see a bit of change in the clean-cut top. Then, I set the two inch tall celery bottom almost up to the top in dirt and kept it watered. Now, I must do the same with onions!

    • I’d like other people to chime in here, because I’ve heard about several, but I only like to speak from experience. I can recommend:

      Garlic cloves: Single cloves, not the whole head, peel on, planted pointy side up, will yield whole heads of garlic in the garden, or garlic chives if planted in pots indoors.

      Potatoes and sweet potatoes: plant chunks with eyes, or sprout in water and then plant, or sprout, pick the sprout itself and just plant that.

      The celery, as Parsimony and I discussed above.

  2. Regular onions also root and develop this way – we’ve been doing it for awhile but often our onions rot from too much rain before they can get to a good size – got some new attempts coming up and doing really well right now so fingers crossed. The green onions, however, we have in containers we can move out of the rain and they do great – we have finally stopped buying green onions which is amazing because they are ubiquitous in Venezuelan cooking. By the way if you’re using the green part of the green onion you can also just cut some off and leave the root in the ground – more green parts will be forthcoming.

  3. It’s amazing. My boyfriend and I discovered this purely by accident about two months ago. You don’t even have to be gentle with them… just shove them in some dirt and water them!

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  5. In my experience, the onion will only resprout two or three times, and they seem to less “oniony” the more the resprout.

    Anyone else have this experience?

  6. Hey have not read every comment but I just cut mine off and leave the roots in the ground, well big planter they are in. I loose less this way it seems. Just good scissors and let them regrow.

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