This variety, White Lisbon, is very quick cropping traditional salad onion with white stems and bright green tops. Can be sown from early spring, in the summer and in the autumn too. Very hardy spring onion, can be overwintered under cloches, in protected areas. Onions have anti-bacterial and antiseptic properties, and also believed to lower blood pressure. Check out our purple spring onion seeds too, and grow some colourful veg in your garden or allotment.

How to Grow Spring Onions from Seed

 People often talk about the difficulties that can be experienced when growing onions from seed, which is why so many choose instead to grow onions from sets (small onions). The difficulties are far fewer, however, with spring onions. Spring onions are a great allium option for small-space growing and can be a good companion plant for other edible garden crops. They can help deter pests and also work well to fill gaps between slower growing crops. Spring onions can not only provide an fresh, onion taste around two months after sowing, they can also keep providing fresh onion greens throughout the season and are the gift that keeps on giving.

 To get a steady supply of spring onions from late spring through to late summer, it is best to sow small quantities of seeds every few weeks between March and September direct outside, or you can sow as early as February and as late as October in the greenhouse.

 Spring onions can be grown in almost any sunny and free-draining site. The site should be free of weeds and of fine tilth. Growing spring onions along the edges of a raised bed (for example a bed used to grow carrots) can help you take advantage of the edge effect. The edge of the bed will not only help you mark your rows, it is also the edge of a system and therefore the most productive zone. Simply make a shallow drill of around 1-2cm, sow seeds thinly into the drill and cover over, watering in gently. This method will also work for any sort of container. Why not use household rubbish to create containers for small scale growing? Alternatively, spring onions can also be grown directly in the soil of a vegetable patch and can be scattered to fill small gaps in a cottage garden that has been well-weeded before sowing.

 One of the great things about spring onions is now fast they grow. You can be harvesting spring onions to use in your salads in as few as eight weeks. You can pick and eat whole spring onions for use at this time, or you can snip off the milder-tasting onion greens and use these, leaving roots in place from which the greens will re-grow. You can also place root sections in water on a windowsill and these will re-grow. Keep the soil around spring onions moist though take care not to over-water and cause waterlogging. The biggest enemy of growing spring onions are weeds – all onions hate competition. Weed well as the spring onions grow – though take care not to weed out spring onions by mistake – they look just like blades of grass at first.

 Anyone can grow spring onions, whether in a garden or on a windowsill, so why not give it a go?