Onions Bolting

[jwardle]

Hi, first post be gentle,

I put some overwinter onions in last October, both red and white. They are looking great but I've had a couple of flower stalks come up, should I nip them off?

Any other advice.

New garden in Cork, Ireland.
Regards j

[bazzaboy]

hi jwardle and a big welcome to GYO, it's a great list for both advice and humour....

The usual reason for planting over-wintering onions is to get an earlier crop to fill the gap between last year's stored onions and this year's mature onions. Onions seem to bolt (i.e. mature early) when variations in weather or growing conditions prompt the plant into thinking the season's changed and it's time for it to go into its next stage. The usual advice for onions that bolt is, if they're of a usable size, to use those ones first and immediately for salads/cooking (they won't store); a less utilitarian approach is to let them go through their whole flowering cycle and use the resulting stalks and heads as a dried flower (because all the aliums make magnificent sculptural shapes and some might reach six foot tall!) Of course any that you let go to their full term aren't edible (but last a lot longer, dried they last years! ) Although in the latter case you will get seeds they're not particularly recommended for future sowings as they might have an inbuilt tendency to bolt (though presumably you could use them for "spring onions").

You might not yet be familiar with the Search Facility on this List - see "Search" in the top menu. If you click on that and enter, for example in this instance, "bolting onions" you'll get a list of various previous posts about this problem, why it happens, solutions etc... and a few good jokes/stories as well!

Happy days..... bb.

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[Two_Sheds]

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