Top 3 Perennial Onions for Food Forests and Resilient Gardens 

diversity also supports a diversity of pollinators

Walking onions... the gift that keeps on giving... and giving... and giving, whether you want it to or not!

The little bulbs on top of walking onions are perfect to peel and add to dill pickles. They add a lot of flavor to the cukes, beans, cucamelons, okra (whatever you are pickling) and the onions are also delicious pickled.

Love this, love onions. I need to plant more chives and start to grow walking (wanted for years) and welsh (New to me) onions. Just a heads up for anyone who finds their chives or garlic chives self-seeding too much (not possible in my mind, but....) just dead head or eat the flowers! I sometime will pickle the buds for a few days for a different way to use them sort of like capers.

Thought it was me not doing something right to get big onions. Bought Welsh onions seeds and planted them out last fall after watching your videos. Was gifted an Egyptian walking onion and chives. 😊

I tried to subscribe , but , RU-vid says I have too many subscriptions !!!! Keep making gardening videos and I'll keep watching !!!! Thank you very much !!!! I'm interested in these three verities of allium !!!!

Chives are so awesome. Makes great stock, flowers can flavour vinegar, nice garnish for eggs, potato salad, etc. endless uses. I have about 10 plants I keep dividing and still not enough.

This was informative and inspiring, I can’t wait to try these. Thanks!😊

Thanks for sharing! Great I love all these varieties.

Enjoyed the video, appreciated the content-info.

Blessings to all!

I wish I had better luck with large bulb onions. I have been growing Egyptian Walking Onions for the last three years. I bought the first bulbils from Etsy and haven't needed to buy anymore since they are self sowing and prolific. I bought some potato onions to try out. I also have a patch of nodding onions that are a nice native food plant.

Bowhahah I love the Dandelion seed heads just chillin behing Angela 😋

Hello from Tigard! I'm so glad I found this channel.

Great video! Perfect timing for me. We started our food forest recently and are happy to be transplanting in Egyptian walking onions very soon. I will consider the others mention for sure. We eat lots of onions. Thank you!

Discovered you a few days ago. Really happy to find someone close to my area doing this (I am near Willamina). I have had Egyptian walking onions and chives for a few years. I'll have to find some Welsh onions and give them a try.

Hello Angela, I grow a ton of garlic chives and scallions that I bought from the grocery store about 3 years ago, they are doing great and so easy to divide and put all around my garden🌱🌱

Great video 👍🏼 I love information about perennial food crops. I keep Egyptian Walking Onions and they work as a replacement for most other onion types in cooking and salads. Winner 🥇

Everyone of these onions I grow here in Oklahoma and as you said they do fantastic. My favorite is the walking onions my spread and multiplied like crazy as they beautiful to me. Plus good eating.

Siberian chives is amazing too

Wonderful video. We eat a lot of onions and I have not had the best luck in growing regular onions. I do have a nice clump of chives. I hope to find a source for the Welsh and Egyptian Walking onion.

I've been propagating store bought green onions for years, but after getting a couple clumps of walking onions going last year I might consider skipping that (some of the older ones start getting a little too papery). Chives are a staple of my garden...almost indestructible 👍

Those Welsh multipliers need the flower tops removed as they show if you want the patch to expand instead of going to seed. Welsh multiplier is my favorite green onion. The flavor is wonderful. I haven't had any luck getting bulbs from them. Once the bottom starts to bulb up, the bulb will send up a cluster of tops, as the bulb itself starts to divide. That said they are an excellent green onion, that we have grown for decades. Egyptian Walking onion is great for green onions as they self sow so well. To get a bulb takes more effort. They need to be planted individually in high sun, and given annual garden care. When doing that we have gotten golf ball sized red onion bulbs and occasionally the top sets get the size of filberts. One perennial onion we have been working with recently is the Potato Onion. Potatoes onions are a multiplier variety that is very shallot like. The bulbs produce tiny bulbs that are replanted each year. They can be hard to track down, and need attention to grow good sized bulbs. We are still building our numbers up, so we mostly replant and have only eaten a few, but they taste like shallots, yum. We grow a lot of alliums. My spouse has a passion for garlic and we have adapted or are in the process of adapting garlic varieties for our local conditions. The only garlic we buy now is seed garlic if we want to try a new variety. We grow enough garlic to get through the year from our garden. Of course most garlic need that annual garden care, except Elephant garlic, but that is closely related to leek and self sows well. Alliums are a facinating family with so many varieties.

I was really excited about growing walking onions but I found they don't really have much flavour at all. Also if you want to use them as green onions, make sure they're still small as the older leaves are too tough to eat.

Zone 5b here, have found that Welsh onions are not reliably hardy. Marginally hardy, depending on severity of winter.

On the walking onions, i've observed in my garden that if I take all the green leaves from a section, the onion underground will divide, if I can't sent up shoots. These onions have a great taste, oniony- without the teary eyes when chopping, and a hint of garlic flavor. I live in the central valley of california zone 9b

The Welsh onion flower turn to seed head, I collect planting in compost trays slow to germinate take about a year to get big. But we'll worth the wait, as the seed heads have a lot of seed

The tree onion, from research (I have not tried them myself yet) will sometimes form a mixture of bulbils and flowers, rather than the bulbil-only umbel. The flowers are reputed to be sterile, but I doubt that.

Have you tried growing long day bulbing onions? Those do really well up north.

I've just planted some perpetual onions allium cepa perutile aka everlasting onion. Very similar to welsh onions. I also just love chives and many of the other smaller clumps of alliums like society garlic, German garlic. Got lots of wild garlic and 3 cornered leeks too. I live alone so don't really need big onions for meals, potato onions are hard to find here in Wales but I would love to get and grow some.

Interesting that you barely plant yours. I actually burry the bulbil. We do have cold winters and maybe climate matters. These onions are amazing ! I keep a jar of chopped EWOnions from mid March and for as long as possible thru the summer, then I start to harvest the mature onions. Yum, thanks for all the info and tips!

Heaven smells of onions and garlic toasting in olive oil. Prove me wrong!😋

Are the welsh onions that have gone to seed eaten or is it just the new onions that are eaten. When do you divide them off, Winter, Spring, Summer or Autumn? Jim.

Planted Egyptian Walking Onion last fall and they seem to be doing well in a sunny exposure. I've tried to get Chives seed to grow but haven't had much luck but I keep trying. I might have to buy plants from the nursery as a last resort.

How do you save the little walking onion bulbils for planting the next season? I saved a couple dozen in a paper bag last fall, but now they seem shrunken and overly dry. Will they still grow?

Hi Angela I recently bought a property a couple of years ago and have started my dream of a permaculture forest it is in a suburban/ rural area in the northern Pacific Northwest just North of Vancouver BC on the Sunshine Coast and I was wondering about your thoughts on dealing with bears and deer on a property that is really too big for me to economically build a fence for . I know you probably live too close to Portland to have to deal with this but maybe you have some experience with these problems when you lived down south , would love to hear any of your practical solutions , we have a crazy bear population and it’s kind of gotten dangerous in the past while , thanks I am a huge fan of your channel !

Aren't Welsh onions the same ones you can get at Walmart? I'm pretty sure I grew a bunch by accident in my yard. It was probably from when I turned my compost heap.

Where can I get the Egyptian walking onion to buy? I would like to get some to plant.

Angela, great video! I planted the bottom one and half inches of the green onions I bought from Walmart. In our zone 8a, they turned out to be perennial. The bloom is white, cluster into a ball, about 1in in diameter. The based of the onion and the blades are also about 1 inch in diameter, more or less. Do you know what kind of onion it could be?

I love this video! Where did you source your Egyptian Walking Onion & Welsh Onion in our area? I've been looking & coming up short. I've been wanting to add them to my Quince quild since I heard Alliums improve the flavor (Possibly from one of your Quince videos 😉)

Do you grow garlic chives as well? Planted some last year. Hoping to get a good taste of them this year.

Garlic can be perennialized! Not only will you get garlic leaves and green garlic most of the season but also you will have a reservoir of your favourite garlic varieties, ready to propagate if you need to. Resilience all over.

Hello, Do you know if any of these or multiple ones will detour deer, as I’ve read garlic and onion do and I’m here in Washington state and looking to grow a hougle mound outside my new food forest for some chestnut and hazelnut trees I just got.

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There's no such thing as a "bulbuel". Its bulbil.

Egyptian walking onions are my favorite. They fill the base of my figs here in 6a.🤌