Perennial Onions!

I love onions, and I have an especially soft spot for weird onions. Like these:

They're called Walking Onions, Egyptian Onions, or Topsetting Onions. As far as I know, they're not from Egypt and it's a mystery how they got that name. They grow from bulbs, produce a huge amount of long, delicious scalliony leaves, and eventually send up a flower stalk. Instead of flowers, it makes more bulbs, in a little cluster. Those bulbs often send up shoots that have another cluster of bulbs on top, and some plants make a third level of shoots and clusters on top of those. Eventually the whole plant falls over from the weight of all these airborne bulbs, and when the bulbs hit dirt they dig in roots. This is why the plant is called "Walking"--because it can move its own bulbs a few feet away from the original plant. 

It reproduces through these airy bulbs and also by creating more bulbs underground, adjacent to the one you originally planted. If you start with one or two bulbs and replant all the offspring, in a few years you'll have hundreds! These are truly perennial onions, and once you reach critical mass with them, you will never have to buy green onions at the store again. The small bulbs on top are strong and spicy and can be used for cooking, salads, or pickling, and so can the underground bulbs. The underground bulbs are about 2 inches across and taste similar to the yellow onions at the grocery store, just a bit stronger. The airborne ones vary from the size of a popcorn kernel to an inch or more across.

Unlike some plants that spread, these are not weedy and it's easy to keep them in one area. If a plant ends up in an area where you don't want it, just dig it up and move it, or eat it. You can eat all the parts of this plant.

This plant is hardy and will come back to life in spring even in the coldest gardens. You usually plant the bulbs in the fall, like garlic, and that's when most seed companies sell them. 

But if you have bulbs and forgot to plant them in the fall, you can plant them any time of the year. I just found some bulbs that I forgot I had, and I'm planting them now.

If you plant these onions in very early spring, you might get a crop of airborne bulbs by the end of the summer, or you might just get the scalliony leaves. The airborne bulbs will show up in the following summer, but they will be worth the wait.