Potato Onion

Potato onions are a perennial bunching onion with nice sized bulbs. Potato onions can be grown season after season similar to shallots. Like shallots, larger potato onions will start dividing after their first season of growth. This selection includes mostly white onions, but some of the onions have brown or even light red skins.These potato onions are delicious, spicy and exceptionally good storage onions. They will keep for up to 12 months if stored on a shelf in a single layer with good air circulation in a cool room/garage/cellar. They also over-winter very well in our zone 7 winters but grow larger when we harvest, divide, cure and replant the onions in the following season. When grown from seed, onion bulbs can get quite large in their first year (up to and larger than baseball size) under the right conditions.Potato onions can also be grown as annuals from seed as you would grow any other standard onion, and they do very well that way. When grown perennially, I am finding that many of the first year onions will flower and go to seed in their second year. Larger onions that are replanted will divide into a "nest" of 4-8 new onions.Harvest 1st year onions when about half of the tops have fallen over, cure the onion and store in a dry cool room. For 2nd+ year onions, wait until after the onions finish flowering and wait until after summer solstice to harvest because the onions will bulb up a bit more.It will appear as if the flower stalk comes from the center of the onion, but it actually comes from below and from the side of the onion, so the stalk can be pulled away from the onion and it stores well. There is a small percentage of onions where the flower stalk does grow from the center.You can grow perennial onions indefinitely this way but the cloned onions will no longer produce seed and may become successively smaller over several years until they reach shallot size onions due to fungus and disease. You can break the disease cycle by dipping the cured bulbs in a 1:9 bleach to water solution for 5-10 minutes before planting. You can also break the disease cycle by planting from seed since seed.The origin of our potato onion genetics comes from from Andy Hahn who is continuing the work started by Kelly Winterton. After a rare flowering of his potato onions, Kelly saved the seed and spent years breeding and distributing seed, bringing this once popular, but now rare form of onion back from obscurity! Tags: Harvest: Mid, Size: Medium, Specialty: Storage, Heritage: Heirloom, Season: Spring Fall.