Potato Onion

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. 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. Harvest onions when about half of the tops have fallen over. Harvest the whole cluster, or take just a few and leave the rest to continue to grow/spread.

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 go to seed. I am saving those onions that don't go to seed for perennial growing and replanting early in the year after selecting the best storage onions from relatively warm conditions indoors. The larger onions that are replanted will split into 4-8 new onions.

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. I personally will be introducing first year seed grown onions into my personal supply every year so that we can enjoy medium through large size onions year after year.

Our original seed came from Andy's Green Mountain Multiplier Onion and I want to acknowledge and thank him here for his hard work in breeding, saving seed 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.