I’ll readily admit I heard about this from PK directly, and have been super happy with how it’s gone – I’ve not bought spring onions for over a year as a result.

The trick is to buy (your last!) bunch of spring onions from the supermarket, and make sure a few of the ends have roots on them.  Then, cut off that part with a centimetre or two of stalk above the roots and stick them in a pot of well draining potting mix.

These were my first two, just chucked in a pot as a tester a long time ago (April, 2018).  They quickly grew and grew, and I let them go to seed, so that I could collect the seeds and re-sow them.

I then sowed a few seeds here and there, but in the meantime, bought some more spring onions from the shops, and then started dropping the bases into larger pots… along with a few coming up from seed.

These grow really quite rapidly, in a matter of days you have spring onions growing rapidly (these ones in the picture below were planted around a day or two apart to get the gist of how quickly they grow).

Nowadays I have three of these longer pots with onions in them, so I can pretty much grab one or two whenever I want to – I just get a pair of scissors and cut them off just above the ground level, and then they reshoot.

 Here they are today:

Last year, I let the whole lot go to seed at one point, and then completely ripped them all out of the pots and replaced all the potting mix.  The soil was a tangled web of little white roots, and I simply shoved them into a back corner of the garden out of the way to see what would happen – they pretty much all kicked the bucket without the attention (i.e. water) they normally get in the pots (they’re on our herb bed edges, where we tend to water frequently).

I know this isn’t great for the farmers that grow the spring onions, but I hope that this can free them up to grow more difficult (and profitable?) vegetables for me – like leeks or other veggies that I can’t grow in the garden!

Anyway, this is such a simple thing to do, and it’s meant that we’ve saved a bit of money buying veggies, and can always get a fresh spring onion from the garden whenever we need one!

Enjoy the gardening in solitude,

Bish

Here are some more of Bish’s tips and kitchen ingredients: