When to start Bunching Onions and Chives?

15 years ago

I have seeds for a perennial bunching onions and Chives, when should I start the seeds? I plan on starting them in cups, because I can not get access one of my gardens till May.

When can they be moved outside?

What night time temps can they take after they start growing?

thanks,

Dean

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Comments (6)

ftan
15 years ago
Onions and chives are pretty cold hardy. You should be able to plant them as soon as the soil is workable and they should grow fine. We just leave our chives in the ground and they come back year after year. I live where winters get to -10 and the chives seem to survive the winter fine without mulching or covering.
msyoohoo
15 years ago
This is my first year with onions so I cannot comment but I think you could probably grow chives out of your ears if you wanted to. I have had some in a pot and some in the garden for years and I do absolutely nothing to them. They just grow and grow. They are usually up before ANY flowering bulbs.
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Much depends on how much work you want to do to harvest earlier onions. I started some bulbing onions about a month ago on the same day as I started leeks. The reason for starting these early is that I want pencil thick stems to transplant through black plastic mulch. Thinner stems tend to end up under the plastic and dying. But in addition to cutting them back I feel that I need to do one transplant after seeding into a deeper flat and seperate plants within and between rows by 3/4" to avoid crowding. This step doubles the work of starting onions. For bunching onions I feel you can start them almost anytime now. Mine are up and I plan to just trim and water those flats for the next month and then pull the matted roots apart when planting them in a furrow. There is alot of plant size variation with this method but I harvest by thinning the largest ones first and that allows harvesting over a 5-6 week period.
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Chives and onions grow like weeds from seed. Just start them as you would any other seeds, in a flat with seedstarting mix. I usually grow my onions by putting a mesh flat full of seedstarting mix into a no holes flat, moisten it well, sow the seeds on the surface and cover it with a clear germination dome and keep it warm until they are up about an inch tall, then move them to the greenhouse in full light. When the roots have the soil bound together, then you can remove the mesh flat out of the no holes flat. If the tops get real tall and start falling over, trim them off to a couple of inches with scissors. Pull them apart to transplant. As long as they are as big as a piece of spaghetti when you transplant they will grow great big onions. Chives are exactly the same as onions in seed care.
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BTW, chives are not the same as onion tops. Chives are much smaller and there is no harvestable bulbs in the soil. I grow a winter type that dies out in summer heat and, has pea sized bulbs. These winter chives some a seed ball of very small bulbils that I replant eevry summer once they are loose and star to fall off the stalks. These are wild onions, but are more like chives when it comes to appearance. Onion tops, or scallions, are different kinds of plants. About the best way to get the most color and flavor in a chive is to freeze dry it. Unfortuneately, you cann't reporoduce the freeze dry process at home. It requires 100+ degrees below zero, a vacuum, and special chambers to remove all traces of moisture.
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The bunching onions, which are Allium fistulosum, are the only true perennial onion. This group is commonly known as Welsh onions (not because they are from Wales, by the way, but from the German word 'welsch' meaning foreign), Japanese bunching onions, bunching onions, long green onions, spring onions and scallions. However, people often refer to some non-bunching onions by some of those same names (especially scallions) so it can get confusing. The other onions commonly referred to as perennial onions are Allium cepa var. aggregatum and are not true perennials but act like perennials. How's that for confusing? This includes all the multiplier onions, also variously referred to as walking onions, Egyptian onions, potato onions (nothing potato-like about them). There is no true perennial onion that produces huge bulbs like the biennial onions that we all plant in winter and harvest in late Spring and early Summer. If you like the Allium fistulosum type of onions and want to try others that are not as well-known as Japanese Bunching, Evergreen, Tokyo, etc., then the Oriental seed company based in California, Kitazawa Seeds, offers 8 different varieties of them: Seeds of Bunching Onion Varieties From Kitazawa Seed In some soils the perennial onions may not be perennial. They can have a hard time surviving prolonged excessively wet weather in clay soil, so do best in raised beds with well-drained soil, including very well-amended clay.
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deanriowa
Original Author
15 years ago
I ended up starting my perennial bunching onions(Franz, Stevenson) a week ago and they have sprouted and growing fine. I over seeded them and I think every seed started.

How many sprouts should I allow to grow per cell? my cells are 2" by 3".

Then when planting should I seperate them?

thanks,
Dean
tn_veggie_gardner
15 years ago
My garlic chive root clusters survived the whole winter outside in their original soil & pot. Once I watered them and added a bit of new soil, they started growing again at an insane rate. They have survived 3 frosts and some bad storms since then. They have also self-seeded 3 babies so far! =) I wouldn't worry about the weather for your chives. I'm not sure about onions as this is my first year growing them.

Peace - Steve

This is a pic of them about 2 weeks ago when they were about 3 weeks old...

{{gwi:360865}}
raisemybeds
15 years ago
I have chives in a bottomless deep container in my garden and they have come back like gangbusters every Spring. They are the first thing up. I don't think I could kill them if I tried.
promethean_spark
15 years ago
Bunching onions and chives you don't have to worry about bulb formation, so you can plant them pretty much any time. They're all cold hardy to at least 20'F, so they can go outside pretty early. Here onions and their allies seem to grow best when we're getting regular frosts...

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When to start Bunching Onions and Chives?

Comments (6)

ftan

msyoohoo

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When to start Bunching Onions and Chives?

Comments (6)

ftan

msyoohoo

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deanriowaOriginal Author

tn_veggie_gardner

raisemybeds

promethean_spark

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