Growing Ogres

Ogres are… like onions. Because they stink? No. Oh, they make you cry? No! Onions have layers! Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers. Hmmm. You know, not everyone likes onions… What about cakes? Cakes have layers and everybody loooooves cakes!

Ok, so I’m not growing ogres. I’m growing spring onions. But… Who doesn’t love some good old Shrek and Donkey?

I love gardening. I love the idea of having all the fruit and veg I need right outside my door. So, now that I have a bigger place I decided to start a vege patch. I’ll have beans and tomatoes, corn and broccoli, carrots and potatoes…and spring onions! I’m always using onions, and to me, spring onions are quite often easily substituted. The benefit to growing spring onion as opposed to brown onions and the like is that they’ll regrow after I cut their heads off… I mean trim the tops. That way I won’t have to resow/harvest/dry and all the other finicky things needed for keeping onions. The plan is to have a constant supply of spring onions available.

Now we all need to start somewhere. Instead of using seeds, I decided to utilise the ends of my store-bought spring onions, which were destined for landfill. It was really easy. All you do is get spring onions with the white bulb and roots still attached. Chop that off about 2cm from the roots and use the green bits as your heart desires. Get a cup, glass or jar. Grab 2 or 3 toothpicks and insert them into the onion base at an angle. Don’t poke them all the way through, just enough that they are holding the onion. You want to have the toothpicks angled so that the roots will sit below the lip of the cup. Get the roots and make sure all of them go into the cup. Fill the cup so that the roots are fully submerged, but the bulb is not. At this stage, the onion is pretty forgiving. After a day you’ll see your flat topped onion start to bulge. Wait a few more days and there will be green leaves. You may need to change the water and top it up over this time. You may even notice the toothpicks changing angles as the onion grows (re-position it as needed). Congrats, you’ve just saved your spring onion from landfill!

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At some point you’ll want to plant this into soil. This is where I killed my plants. Well, not at the transplanting stage, but at the over-loved stage. See, I think I buried the onions too deep. Instead of just covering the roots, I also put about 1cm of the bulb under the soil too. This caused my plants to rot and die 😥 But I soldier on and now have some new babies…onions… ready for transplanting! Wish me luck!

Bake on (?),

Beth 🙂