Spring Onions Spring…

My next green adventure – planting onions…

Before i get into that, i have to sob over the deaths of my beloved tulips… that’s right they died, died even before they had a chance to be anything more than green leaves… SOB!

How did that happen? Well, the cold got to them. Why didn’t i save them? Because i didn’t know that they were suffering from the cold. i’m no green thumb and have killed my share of plants. But still i wanted to grow something, something nice and/or edible. (See previous attempts here, here and here.) This year i researched and decided to go with tulips because i love tulips and they are said to be easy to grow. To cut a long story short, they popped up during unseasonal warm weather in March. Then as it is with unpredictable Swiss Spring weather, the cold set in again. However, i didn’t realise it would affect my tulips. My reasoning – they were planted before the frost and lived through the cold winter (in fact they need the cold before they can germinate) so they should be fine as temps were above freezing. Little me of no green knowledge – sigh! The bulbs needed the cold but once they popped they have to be protected from the cold! i found that out too late.

SO… i have grieved over them the last month and now feel ready to go for another green attempt.

For some strange reason, i had onions which budded while sitting in an open basket in the kitchen. Not all of them budded, just two. It has happened before and i normally just throw them out. But i thought otherwise this time. So i headed to the trusty old internet and found a couple of entries which talked about using the cut-off bottom ends of onions (normally thrown away), and another which said that it was possible to try planting onions which budded in the pantry. So i waited till the rains eased up (it had been raining almost everyday for almost 2 weeks before this past Thursday). And have planted them, hoping for some nice spring onions to eat. (Fingers, toes and eyes all crossed.)

So meet my onion babies: