[tosca100]

Feeling very fed up. The other day I was admiring the onions and how they are bulking up already....today every one of the 200 autumn planted onions have a seed head. Have been round and nipped them off but the onions are nowhere near ready. Will have to pull them all and slice and freeze while they are in good condition.

Gutted

[Salmo]

They will make a bit of bulb but they will not keep. Were they red or white?

There is still time to plant sets. They will not make huge onions but they will keep.

[tosca100]

They were white, no variety just the ones from the market. OH is going to try to get there on wednesday to see if anyone has any left, but depends on the chap he's working for. We had a warm spell then it went very cold again so maybe that's what did it.

[tosca100]

Well, 200 more planted and growing away. The bolted ones are being used but today I pulled fifty or so to put some sprouts in. Got very little for the effort but will chop and freeze ready for summer soups. I'll leave the rest for now.

[Snoop]

Very strange. They don't look like they have much of a bulb, Tosca. Certainly they're much smaller than I would expect for an autumn-planted onion, which would ordinarily be about ready for picking here at this time of year.

Have you asked your neighbours if they're what would normally be expected? Maybe the variety looks like that...

[tosca100]

The flower stalks on all but two were huge, nearly an inch across. The ones left in might do more, but a lot have also split and each split bulb also went to seed. Each flower stalk had one of these little 'spring onion' type things attached I might have left them in if I could spare the room, and there are still a couple of hundred, but the new ones went where my winter greens were going to go. Next year we will go back to the tiny sets we had last year, but the onions, though good, have concave bases which makes them hard to peel. I will grow more from seed for keeping.

[Hampshire Hog]

Very interesting my red onion sets planted a couple of months ago have generated flower stalks!!!
However my Sturon onion sets seem to be growing happily.
At present I think I will just see whether they bulk up at all

Cheers HH

[cadalot]

Some of my over wintered spring onions have gone to seed

[Goosegirl]

The bulb bits don't look right for normal onions and I'm wondering if they are something else from the same family.

[Snoop]

The bulb bits don't look right for normal onions and I'm wondering if they are something else from the same family.

Yes, that was my thought. They look like some kind of clumping onion, Tosca. If so many have done the same thing, maybe that's what they're meant to do.

[tosca100]

Go to seed? I don't understand why a clumping onion should go to seed. They don't do shallots and such here in the villages, just large onions, brown for over wintering and spring (with a pinky tinge...some of them) red (salad they call them) or yellow (overwinter with concave root) We got all our sets from villagers.

[Snoop]

I grow something that looks very similar to your onions. They are used locally for barbequeing but I also use them instead of onions as they are very sweet.

The whole process in the case of our calçots, as these onions are called, is grow an onion from seed, lift the onion in summer, then replant as a set in autumn. Numerous shoots then develop out of the original onion, which rots away. I cheat and buy the onions in late summer and plant them. The shoots look just like your onions and have a concave root end, and are eaten as soon as they reach a useable thickness any time between December and usually April, by which time they are usually starting to go to seed.

But if you got your sets from villagers, you'd expect them to grow just like everyone else's, that's for sure.

[tosca100]

Bit of an update on the disastrous onions, I didn't get round to pulling any more up, other than when I needed one, and to my surprise they started to grow! So I left them in and some are really good, others are coming along to be useful in my day to day cooking and chutney making. Some are still tiny once you get rid of that flower spike, but I am so glad i was so lazy. Should have plenty of onions after all with the extras OH put in.

So I would say, if your's bolt and you don't need the space, nip the flower off and hope for the best! Though if you do need the space it's a bit different.

[mjg000]

Autumn planted garlic and small shallots which have looked fantastic all winter are suddenly growing flower heads. 
The shallots are in modules of 2/3 and have begun to die back but now have seed heads - presumably they are ready to lift, but the garlic - mainly elephant garlic, has very green leaves but many are producing seed heads and thick stalks, do I just cut off the seed head and wait for them to die back before lifting , or do I need to lift them now?

[sunshineband]

Quite a few of my autumn planted sets have grown flower stalks, which I removed as soon as I saw them. The bulbs have bulked up well, and as they are not for long storage, I reckon all will be well after all.

Thank goodness