Onions & garlic
Scallions (bunching)
Cool-season allium; sow Sep to Oct and Jan to Feb.
- Outside
- Direct Sep to Oct, again Jan to Feb
- Where
- Bed edge, raised bed, or a small bag
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- When the top half inch dries; winter rain helps
- Harvest
- Winter to spring, pull anytime
Care
- Water
- Shallow-rooted, so water once the top half inch of soil dries; winter rain does most of the work, and the dry spells between fronts are when a row wants a soak. No drama if you skip one; they forgive a lot.
- Sow
- Direct sow thick in a 2 inch band, a quarter to half inch deep, in the county's fall-winter rounds: September into October, then January into February. Pulling for dinner is the only thinning, and a pinch of seed into each cleared patch keeps a row going.
- Feed
- The light feeder of the allium family: a shovel of compost worked in at sowing carries this quick crop start to finish. Skip the liquid feed and go easy on nitrogen, which grows floppy tops over flavor.
- Ready
- Pull once they reach the thickness you want, pencil-size from about 60 days on; there is no wrong size. The fall sowing feeds the winter kitchen and the winter sowing fills spring. A patch left standing often holds in ground that never freezes and restarts itself.
- Trouble
- The failure mode is the calendar, as with every cool-season crop here: a sowing that slips into the heat stalls and turns sharp. Beyond that they forgive crowding, missed waterings and a bed edge with half-day sun, which is why the row lives at the garden's edge.
In a bag?
- Yes
- Up to a 1–3 gal bag.
- Water
- When the top half inch dries, which in a warm spell means every other day; a small bag dries fast.
- Sow
- The Texas container guide lists green onions at 1 gallon and ideally suited; sow thick and one small bag by the door runs all winter.
Scallions fill the allium row's off-season here: sown thick in September and again in late winter, a patch by the kitchen door feeds the winter kitchen.
Growing
The county's fall-winter lists carry green onions in the greens-and-allium rounds, sown as a cool-season succession: September into October, then January into February. Sow thick along a bed edge or in a small bag; harvest is the thinning, so pull what dinner needs and scatter seed into the gaps. The plants stand the winter here, in ground that never freezes solid, and a patch left alone at the end of the season usually restarts itself for spring's first alliums.
Varieties
No Texas source names a green onion variety, so the packet stays generic and the entry says so; any bunching onion seed behaves alike here.
In the kitchen
The whole plant works: white ends in the pan with the garlic, green tops scissored over everything from tacos to the salsa bowl. They carry the sofrito-adjacent base notes of the winter kitchen.