Egyptian Walking Onions / Tree Onions (Allium × proliferum) in 90 mm Bottomless Pot

Family: Amaryllidaceae (includes Amaryllis, Agapanthus, Clivia and Scadoxus)
Genus: Allium (includes onions, leeks, garlics, chives)

Botanical/Binomial Name: Allium × proliferum
Meaning of Name:
Allium from Latin allium (‘garlic’); and
proliferum from Latin proliferum (‘prolific’)

Common Names: Walking Onion, Egyptian Walking Onion, Tree Onion, Top-setting Onion

Botanical Characteristics: Herbaceous | Perennial | Evergreen | Frost hardy
Propagation: Bulblets | Division of bulbs

Item Description:
Dimensions of the bottomless pot are 90 mm square × 150 mm deep. The square shape and bottomless design produces beautifully straight and deep roots with no spiralling whatsoever. This gives these young plants every advantage once planted out.

Plant Description:
A versatile and prolific onion which keeps on giving! Eat the bulbs as onions, and the leaves as spring onion shoots — though please note the bulbs are not especially large (shallot-size at best), being a cross between the regular big-bulbed culinary onion Allium cepa and the non-bulb-forming spring/bunching/Welsh onion Allium fistulosum.

Stronger tasting than regular onions or shoots — these little bulbs really pack quite a punch. The top-setting bulblets can also be eaten if you have the patience to prepare them!

When starting out, best to just let these bulbs grow while harvesting the leaves. This way you can produce more onions (and plants) more quickly. You can leave the bulbs in a clump, or separate out to plant individually.

Sometimes in the first year, but more typically by the second year, a tall stem will appear from the centre, with a cluster of bulblets developing on the top. You can pick and eat these (or transplant elsewhere to grow a new plant), or allow the weight of these to bend the leaf over — this is the ‘walking’ part as these bulblets will root in the ground to produce new plants a small distance from the parent.

If the stem doesn‘t bend over, the bulblets will sprout in the air, and one may even produce another stem with bulblets on top — the ‘tree’ part. It‘s the funniest onion plant you‘ll ever see!

The bulblet stems will turn brown and die off. Remaining bulblets not eaten will sprout, and can be picked off for planting elsewhere, or left to root where they make contact with the ground. The original bulb can be dug up and eaten as a larger onion, or will continue to produce edible leaves if left alone.

Growing Information:
The individual plants can be separated before planting out, or together in a larger pot or directly into the ground. I grow all our Allium species in a dedicated bed as well as in 3 L and 9 L Air-Pot containers closer to the kitchen, as the entire onion family does especially well in these.

Walking onions are very hardy and established plants will grow even in snow! Small, new, bulblets may hunker down over winter conserving energy before putting out a leaf in spring. Protecting these new bulblets in very cold winter cimates with a layer of mulch doesn’t go astray either.

Wherever and however you grow them, I do wholeheartedly recommend at least some be in a pot by the kitchen for quick access — as with their relatives the spring/bunching/Welsh onions, the leaves readily grow to a centimetre thick and over 30 cm high, making a leaf or two go very far in daily use!

The unusual growing habit of walking onion plants makes them natural clumpers as well as spreaders, and over time they will fill a space of their own accord. Unless you wish to establish new ‘colonies’ elsewhere via the prolific bulblets, just let them be to propagate of their own accord. Older bulbs will die off over time, but the continuous supply of bulblets ensures dozens more plants will spring up in their place with refreshed vigour every year.

Having said that, once clumps become too dense the individual plants will grow smaller and show other signs of stress, and it is best to divide these clumps and plant anew.