Underneath our Figs, or along garden bed edges, you’ll find forests of green stalks, some topped with bursts of white flowers, some topped with bundles of purple bulblets. The tops belong to two different kinds of Perennial Onions.  

Welsh Onions (Allium fistulosum) look a fair bit like a common onion with the familiar round Allium umbel of gorgeous white flowers with small viable seeds. Summer pollinators flock to the flowers, which are a delicacy for stir fries and soups. Unlike common onions, they don’t really form bulbs. Instead, the succulent green leaves serve as the main harvest. We cut them constantly throughout the year, causing even more stems and clumps to resprout like a miniature coppice. The leaves are often fresh and plump into December and reemerge as early as March. The Latin name fistulosum means hollow, describing the inside of the leaves but certainly not the taste. They’re used like scallions and as garnishes in East and Southeast Asian cuisine, where they’re ranked as a top ten vegetable crop. In Japan, they’re popular for miso soup and negimaki (beef-and-scallion rolls). Given their popularity, they’re often called Japanese Bunching Onion, though they aren’t from Japan. They’re also not actually Welsh, which isn’t a reference to Wales but to an Old English word meaning “foreign.” So-called Welsh Onion are not foreign where they come from, which is central and northwestern China, with literary references over 2,000 years old. Most farmers have saved their own Bunching Onion seed, which means lots of genetic diversity, local variations, and considerable room for breeding resilient perennial crops!

Walking Onions (Allium proliferum) get their name a little more straightforwardly, so to speak. Instead of Allium seedheads, they propagate through purple bulblets, some sprouting into more dark-green stalks like long legs in the air. When those bulblets get too heavy, the stalk bends down to the ground where the sprouting bulblets plant themselves. Speed up this process and these clumps look like they’re walking around the garden! The zigzag spreading habit reminds some people of ancient hieroglyphics, but they’re also called Topset Onion (referring to bulblets) and Tree Onion (maybe our favorite name!). Walking Onions are a hybrid of Welsh Onions and shallots, but we’re not entirely sure where they strolled from, though some researchers believe the Romani people introduced them to Europe from India. We use the leaves as green onions, the unformed bulbs can be chopped up for potent use, and the topsets are also tasty: peel them, fry them, pickle them!

We propagate our Japanese Bunching Welsh Onions by seed and our Walking Tree Onions by following the path of their topsets.