Ive been growing out Kelly Winterton’s ‘Green Mt’’ potato onions, as well as my own seedlings derived from his onions. Ive been interested in crossing these large proliferum aggregatum onions with topsetting tree / walking onions to hopefully produce a good quality bulb onion that can be grown from a topset. Ive only done OP seedlings, no controlked crosses, but i did make an effort to find a few topset onions that made flowers on their second tier and to pot them up and place them nearby. Just the other day, I noticed that I have one potato onion that clearly has formed topsets. It appears that it also formed some true flowers, which I removed. I will definitely grow these topsets out and see if I can get them to proliferate and hopefully reproduce from topsets reliably. I imagine that somatic mutation will lead to preferential topsetting over time after being grown from topsets a number of times.
interesting project. i would like to follow your progress if you post updates from time to time on this. Also i grew walking onions from seed last year they are going great this year.
cool. i didnt know they made viable seed. what are the seedlings like? any idea what the pollen parents were?
Interesting project and I hope it goes well. Love to see your followup replies.
as far as i know they are self pollinating, i do not grow any other onions because walking onions are self sustainable without any effort on my part, however my seed grown walking onions did not set top-sets this year, just a flower that went to seed so i planted them as well. the thing is i noticed some walking onions produce a flower and a top set, so i waited till the seeds in the flower turned black and started them that same year, i have six onions growing in a pot and will put them in the ground soon, they got big. i wanted genetic diversity rather than all of my walking onions having the same genetics. next year I’ll know more about their characteristics.