At this point you may be tired of hearing me rave about these, but I felt inspired to write a whole article about this plant.

I’ve been growing them for a handful of years now and regularly use them for cooking throughout the season so I wanted to give you the opportunity to appreciate this special crop as much as I do.

I have mentioned these briefly in an older article about various wild onions, but today will be an in-depth look:

Scientific Name: Allium × proliferum

Preferred Habitat: Walking onions prefer soils that are mildly acidic to neutral with good levels of organic matter. That said, they’re very adaptable and will gladly grow in many soil types including sandy, clay, and loam. Like all onions, they like nitrogen as well.

Edible Parts: Whole plant, but bulbs, stalks, and bulblets are typically consumed.

Distribution: Unclear what the natural range is, but they can be grown in many parts of the US:

Harvest Season: Most of the year (The green scallion tops in the fall and winter, bulbs and scallion tops during the rest of the year)

Nutrition:

There aren’t particular studies on walking onions, but being so closely related to shallots (they have shallot parentage) I imagine that the nutrition facts are very similar:

Like most onions, these are the health benefits of shallots:

These can be used any way you’d use most onions (particularly shallots).

I’ve found them to be very versatile and a good onion flavor despite being the size of a small shallot, and they do great with eggs, meat, soups, salads, ramen, pasta, or pickled.

The green tops can be eaten like scallions, although the stalks will get more fibrous as the plant starts to grow the bulblets on top (more on that below). After that, the plant will grow more green tops and just kind of do its thing until winter.

These are a genuinely interesting plant to grow.

They are a frost hardy perennial plant that will regrow every year if you leave it in the ground. I think these would also make a good shade crop since they aren’t a fruiting plant and lots of other onions tend to do alright in the shade.

They first grow the normal onion “leaves” that look like garlic or chives, but then as the temperatures start to warm up, the plant forms a little sterile “flower” head (this plant is a cross between welsh onions and shallots, so the resulting plant rarely if ever produces true seed rendering it “sterile”).

This little “flower head” is actually a clump of a few “bulblets” known as “bulbils”. These little bulbils are just tiny onions and can be eaten or planted. This cluster actually weighs the entire plant down to the ground where the bulbils will start forming roots and sprout a new plant in a “walking” fashion.

The other unique part of this plant’s growing habits is that it multiplies. Underground, the plant will eventually form multiple bulbs in a cluster! This is exciting because that means you can take some larger bulbs, leave the rest, and gather more in the future as the plant matures each year!

One trait I have noticed is that the bulbs and bulbils will be small for the first couple seasons, but each year they will get progressively larger. I personally love this trait because it means you aren’t stuck with smaller onions forever!

Don’t worry; while they do propagate easily, they aren’t very hard to keep contained and definitely don’t grow to invasive levels! (At least not that I’ve ever heard of).

For the first two years that I had this plant, I was constantly splitting the bulbs to plant elsewhere, and sticking the bulbils in the ground. I went from 4 bulbils that my mother gave me to a few hundred plants within 2-3 years!

This is definitely an abundance crop.

The history on these onions is kind of unclear.

We don’t know the exact origins of the onion, but we know that European and American gardeners started writing about them in the late 1700s.

Originally they were called “Egyptian Walking Onions” but that was most likely a marketing name and not the actual origin. Right now most botanists think they were probably from Pakistan or India where they were introduced to Europe, then later to America.

They are also called “tree onions”, “topsetting onions” or “winter onions”.

To give you an idea of how long it takes to harvest, below is a picture of how big some were by the following season after planting as bulbils. I significantly delayed the maturity time of mine since I focused on just propagating as many as I could for a couple years, but if you aren’t doing that you can expect a few harvestable onions much faster.

It might be obvious, but the reason I love these is because it’s often a lot of hassle to grow traditional bulb onions from seed, and even from starts it can take quite awhile. With walking onions, once they’re established all you have to do is harvest!

These are in my experience, a zero maintenance crop. Literally set-and-forget.

There actually ARE a couple cultivars of walking onions, however they don’t vary too wildly:

Walking onions will come pre-rooted in a pot for you, and some are already producing bulbils! They are only $6 per pot.

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