How to Save Green Onion Seeds
I don’t love growing bulb/common onions since pests can be a big issue where I’m at. However, I love growing green onions (also called scallions or bunching onions) as a great alternative! They are much easier and are still pretty versatile.
If you are growing green onions and want to save seeds from your plants for next growing season, it’s a simple process! Read on for the easy steps 🙂
1. Let plants flower
Instead of removing all your green onions at the end of a growing season, leave a few in the ground to mature. Green onions are biennial plants, meaning they take two years to complete their entire lifecycle. This is opposed to annuals, which complete their lifecycle in one year, or perennials, which live for 3 or more years.
In their second year, the plants will still grow the green onion stalks you might be familiar with (first photo below). You can continue snipping these and using them for cooking. However, at some point during that second year, you’ll notice that your plants will send up tall, hollow stalks with globe-shaped pom-pom looking heads (second photo below).
These are green onion flowers. Leave them! Your plant must flower before it can go to seed. During this process, you can continue to snip green onion stems, but the plant will likely slow its production way down. That’s because it is focusing its energy on completing its lifecycle by flowering and going to seed, not on growing more foliage.
2. Watch flowers mature
After the flowers bloom, the blossoms will dry out and form small black seeds. However, those seeds are encased within brown husks. Some of those husks will also be empty. The brown husks or balls aren’t the seeds.
This process can take several weeks. The seeds are ready to harvest when the flower head starts to dry, turn brown, and the little black seeds are visible.
3. Collect the seeds
Seed heads are delicate. If you wait too long, the seeds may scatter in the garden on their own. Check often so you don’t miss your harvest! Once you see the brown husks begin to crack open and give you a peek at the black seeds, you can cut the whole flower head off.
You can shake the flower in a paper bag or gently over a paper towel to loosen seeds. Or you can pick them out. If you’re picking them out, you can remove a little brown husk and rub it between your fingertips to reveal with little black seeds. The seeds should be very hard.
4. Dry & store
As a final step, I recommend spreading the small black seeds out on a paper towel and letting them sit and dry for about 24 hours. This will help to ensure there is no extra moisture on the seeds, which can cause mold issues when you store them.
When the seeds are completely dry, you can store them in a little paper bag or in an air-tight container. The seeds should remain viable for a couple years after you save them.
A few extra tips
If you’re growing multiple onion varieties nearby, know that cross-pollination can happen. To keep seeds true to type, grow only one variety at a time or separate varieties as much as possible.
Regardless of whether you’re isolating varieties of onions or not, saving your own seeds from strong plants year after year can help you develop a strain of green onions that grows best in your garden. And that’s what it’s all about 🙂
