I’m getting restless. Seed catalogs have been coming in the mail and I’m chomping at the bit to start a garden. Some days the weather is so nice that I’m tempted to start now, at least with some kale or spinach. I’m also feeling kind of guilty – last year we didn’t have any garden. At all. So as someone who professes to be as self sufficient as possible, it’s kind of driving me nuts that I can’t garden. I did buy an indoor grow light to try my hand at micro greens, but that’s in the garage where it’s still getting as low as 16° F some nights. Well, last night right out of the blue my wife asked if we could try growing some green onions inside. Really??? Not just yes, but oh HECK YES…
Baby steps…
The thing is, my wife isn’t a prepper. In fact she has a really bad case of normalcy bias. Also she let me convert our living room into a home gym last year, so I wasn’t going to ask for more space in the house to experiment with an indoor winter garden. So when she asked about growing green onions, indoors, now… it was kind of a miracle. As far as prepping goes, growing green onions in our kitchen isn’t a big deal. Almost nothing in fact. But… baby steps, you know? It gets my wife interested in producing some of our own food. It gives us experience with indoor gardening during the winter. And, well., it should be fun…
Winter gardening – green onions
Green onions are really easy to grow. You don’t even have to start with transplant sets, let alone seeds. We just went to Walmart and got a pack of green onions. Make sure to get ones that aren’t trimmed – they need to still have the roots on the bottom of the bulb.
You don’t need to make this complicated. The soil needs to be at least 4″ deep, but deeper than 6″ is a waste. Home Depot and Lowes have 6″ deep x 6″ wide x 24″ long rectangular planters that would be perfect. We just used a plastic dish pan I had in the garage. Soil should be something that drains well. I had a bag of potting soil in the garage so I used some of that.
Once you have your pots and soil set up, just plant the onions so the transition between the bulb and the leaves is level with the top of the soil. You might be asking “What’s the point? You just stuck some already grown plants into some soil. You could have just eaten them as is without the extra trouble.” If I was eating the whole plant, you’d be right. The nice thing about green onions though is if you just cut the leaves, they’ll keep growing back. So we’ll have green onion leaves as long as I can keep the plants alive.
Peace out,
porcupine