Your Small Kitchen Garden

In late spring or early summer, a starburst flower explodes on the top of an onion plant’s center stalk.

I hope you’re growing onions in your small kitchen garden. Onions provide a rather poor return on your gardening investment: if you don’t have much space for a garden, you’d do well to consider other plants that produce more food per square inch. However, onions put on an impressive display.

Most gardeners start with sets which are essentially tiny onions. Once planted, a set sprouts fleshy green shoots that grow a foot-and-a-half long and longer. Then, a ball starts to form with its top showing just above the soil’s surface. Through the growing season, that ball grows larger as the plant produces a starburst flower on its tallest stalk.

By the time the onion flowers, a ball has probably started to form between the stalk and the roots.

The flower eventually fades, leaving new onion plants ready to go in the soil. Finally, the fleshy green stalks wither, leaving only the onion itself stuck partway into the soil.

Life-Changing Onion Folklore

When I was a kid, my grandmother demonstrated a characteristic of onions that I’ve seen presented nowhere else. To impress upon you the full impact of this life-changing onion lore, I prepared a short video of the presentation she gave me those many years ago.

Please take two minutes to learn about this remarkable characteristic of onions so you can apply the knowledge in your own small kitchen garden:

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