hey folks. looking to try growing potato onions. wondering if anyone has some bulbs to buy or trade for? i got Egyptian walking onion bulbils to trade or i can buy them outright. id like to start a patch so a doz. bulb would be great but ill take any amount you’re willing to part with.
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I am in the early stages of a project to resurrect a locally adapted potato onion. You might find the link below interesting.
https://LongKeepingApples.com/PotatoOnions.html
I am sorry I cannot send you any bulbs - I am in the UK and it is not legal to do this. Also, I don’t really have any to spare at the moment until I get my numbers up.
So how can you get Potato Onions? It is my feeling that “Potato Onion Characteristics” are present in all onions - just suppressed due to the “trueing up” of the gene line in common commercial varieties. If you plant a wide variety of onion types and let them randomly cross with each other and then plant the resulting seeds you will see a wide variety of shapes and sizes in the offspring. Save the best of these and replant them for seed. The mongrelization will have released some of the latent genes and in the second year some of them will look kind of “splitty”. Separate out those and cross them in with each other and you will eventually get onion bulbs that reliably split - even if they also set seed. At least I am finding this to be the case. You might be able to purchase some Potato Onion Seed online and throw that into the mix as well.
Do the above selective breeding process for enough years and you will eventually have a locally adapted Potato Onion cultivar. At least that is what I seem to be seeing - it is early days yet.
If worse comes to worse if you don’t get potato onions you will still have developed a nice locally adapted cultivar.
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I have some onion bulbs I can trade with you. Tried sending a PM but it was not working.