How to Save Onion Heirloom Seeds:
Onions produce seed by putting up one slender stalk that flowers and then makes seed. If you want your onions to keep putting their energy into making bulbs rather than diverting it to making seed just snap the flower stems off when they start to make flowers.
Onion pollen carried by insects; you can't have pure breed seed unless you grown only one kind have only one kind flowering at a time, or keep your different kinds quite separate. On the other hand, if they do cross, the results will be edible and may have hybrid vigor!
Onion are biennial if you're going from seed to set and then from set to bulb. You save good bulbs from the plants you choose to be parents (your sets) and set them out the next spring. To keep seed-making plants from losing your onion seed by scattering before it is ripe on the plant, fasten a paper bag over the seed head with a rubber band. Then you can harvest seed, bag and all, when you're ready. But first give the insects a chance to do their job completely. Or you can gather your onion seed a little earlier and finish drying on a newspaper.
Onion seeds will last for years if well dried and sealed in glass where humidity can't get at them, but they will die in just a few months if you have them in a warm humid place. Getting them too dry by artificial heating will kill them too. They are one of the shortest-lived seed unless conditions are just right.
Onions produce seed by putting up one slender stalk that flowers and then makes seed. If you want your onions to keep putting their energy into making bulbs rather than diverting it to making seed just snap the flower stems off when they start to make flowers.
Onion pollen carried by insects; you can't have pure breed seed unless you grown only one kind have only one kind flowering at a time, or keep your different kinds quite separate. On the other hand, if they do cross, the results will be edible and may have hybrid vigor!
Onion are biennial if you're going from seed to set and then from set to bulb. You save good bulbs from the plants you choose to be parents (your sets) and set them out the next spring. To keep seed-making plants from losing your onion seed by scattering before it is ripe on the plant, fasten a paper bag over the seed head with a rubber band. Then you can harvest seed, bag and all, when you're ready. But first give the insects a chance to do their job completely. Or you can gather your onion seed a little earlier and finish drying on a newspaper.
Onion seeds will last for years if well dried and sealed in glass where humidity can't get at them, but they will die in just a few months if you have them in a warm humid place. Getting them too dry by artificial heating will kill them too. They are one of the shortest-lived seed unless conditions are just right.
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