Egyptian Walking onions in a Hotchkiss street planter – 2014
Valley Gardening: The Fabulous Non-Commercial Egyptian Walking Onion
By Thomas Wills
In the 1990’s my wife and I became friends with a wonderful older couple, Joe and Mary Monson, who were enthusiastic gardeners of unusual plants. One day during a visit to our bookstore in Hotchkiss they brought some freshly dug, onion-looking plants and explained that they were Egyptian Walking Onions (also known as topsetter or multiplying onions). Tragically the Monson’s were killed a few years later when, during a storm, their car went off the road and over a cliff on Black Mesa. We think of them with every season of new onions and feel it a duty to give plants to others.
The name, besides being a pioneer-era biblical reference, comes from one of the ways the plants propagates by forming little onion bulblets on the top of tall stalks. After a time the plants become top heavy and the plant falls over, usually in the autumn, and when the bulblets touch the ground they root down. Or you can simply plant the mature sets somewhere more convenient.
In the meantime a single plant with an immature, leek-like edible base will divide into several plants over the course of a season and on into the following spring. After a year or two one plant becomes a large clump as that clump, if undeterred has “walked” to form new clumps. The few plants that the Monson’s shared twenty years ago have now become hundreds.
So what good are Egyptian Walking Onions? Well, first they make an interesting landscaping plant as you can see from the plethora of them in front of the Hotchkiss bookstore. For the more formal flower gardener they make a nice “spike” border planting background to shorter, colorful flowers. But I love them for eating. They are the first thing up in my gardens in the spring. The tender onions shoots grace the first salads of the season and then once the heavy stalks have begun forming I pull the larger ones as needed and peel and chop the bottom few inches of the root, using it as you would any other mild onion or leek. This is then available for the entire season, spring to fall. Then, in late spring/early summer the bulblets form and begin sprouting on top of the stalks sending out a brand new crop of green onions for salads. I am constantly plucking and nibbling them as I wander around working in the gardens.
I have also found that in good soil with plenty of water the root bulbs will grow up to two or three inches across. You can then harvest them by pulling them and tying them in bundles with the stalks attached and hanging to dry. They can then be hung in the cellar or kitchen for winter storage similar to how you would hang mature garlic. The top bulblets can be stored in a cool dry place for planting during the first winter thaw. Or you can just plant them in the fall like you do garlic.
And, if you wish, a section of the plants could be covered in hay or straw in early winter and the roots can thus be easily harvested all winter. During some warmer periods of local winter, like this past January 2015, they will occasionally sprout and send out shoots. They are extremely hardy. I have planted and grown bulblets that had stayed atop stalks for an entire winter.
Someone told me that the Fort Uncompaghre living history museum in Delta has some of the plants which they refer to as “winter” onions. Yes, they are a heirloom plant that pioneers grew, but that has become rare in this day of grocery store onions. They have faded from popularity over time since they are essentially an almost-wild plant and have little “commercial” use; just a near-permanent, handy source of onion for the home garden. Think of them in the same terms as lambs quarters, arugula, rhubarb and wild asparagus. Low maintenance edible plants that are closer to nature than many things in the garden.
Stop by the used bookstore in Hotchkiss and dig up a few plants with our compliments and help reestablish this fascinating, historical, heirloom plant.
Tags: Colorado, Hotchkiss, Thomas Wills, Valley Gardening, walking onions