Welcome to our monthly podcast.
Today, our guest is Kelly Winterton, who is famous for his potato onions.
And Kelly was one of the first plant breeders that inspired me like 15 years ago.
He was doing plant breeding in his backyard and world famous for his potato onions.
And so I always said I wanted to be like Kelly.
And this is my first time meeting Kelly, but Holly Hansen and Kelly have known each other for years.
And so I'm going to ask Holly to introduce Kelly.
So this is this is so exciting for me to have both Joseph and Kelly at my home office.
So exciting. I wish you all were here with us.
But I met Kelly 20 some odd years ago when I worked in a photography lab.
I used to do I won't say the name of the company, but it was a color lab.
And I did fun stuff with pictures, layers and all that kind of thing.
Did a lot of really fun stuff. And he was our color tech and he is so good at that.
And I would just go show him. I'd print off one of my prints and show him and he'd say three, three yellows, one this or minus that.
And just from his head. And I'd go do it.
And it was perfection. And we've been friends and stayed in touch.
And I've talked to him about gardening and things. When I met Joseph, I told him I was going to visit Kelly Winterton and he goes, the potato onion guy.
And I'm like, I don't know, because I had no idea that Kelly was famous for Landry's potato onions.
We just were friends and share a lot of similar interests. So that's not a very good bio, Kelly.
But it's a friendship that's gone on and it's so interesting in our lives and all of you are my friends and becoming my friend.
And it's fun to get to know you. How are how the things that we're interested in interweave and life is just it's just this big weaving and we keep crossing each other's paths in different ways.
And this is so fun with going to seeds that we can help each other. And now we've added seeds and plants to the weaving and it's just a really exciting thing.
But I want you to hear from Kelly and Joseph's got some good questions for him at the end. If we have time, we'll do a little tour of my kitchen garden.
Okay, go ahead, guys. I'll be monitoring questions from my cell phone. So if you have questions, type them in.
And I'll ask these, you'll be able to hear me through this mic, but you won't see me. Okay, go for it. Thank you, Holly. Thank you, Julia for facilitating our chat today.
Anything you'd like to add to the introductions, Kelly.
Well, I think it was only a brief part that Holly and I also have another connection and maybe she didn't bring this out on purpose. So maybe I'm spilling the beans here, but Holly and I have also known each other for a couple of decades through the family history research and where we had a common, what should I call it, assignment at the family history center.
And we also share that in common. And so, Holly and I, we've known each other for a long time, but we did Holly and I didn't become intimately close friends until the aspect of gardening came into it and that kind of made everything come full circle.
Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about where you live and what kind of gardening you do.
Yeah, I live in northern Utah and some of the people I'm seeing on the screen here in front of me, I don't have any idea what the reach is as far as how far away we're talking for climates and stuff. Florida, California, Europe, somewhere.
In Germany. Yeah, England. Good economic.
Maybe I better switch back to English, it becomes old for people here. So if that's the case, then as far as Florida, California, Europe, and some of these, Croatia? Wow.
I think that where I garden is applicable and important because I'm in zone four in northern Utah. I'm in a mountain valley and people just through the canyon and on the other side of the valley are at least one zone warmer than I am.
I do have some issues as far as being able to garden. That issue has been acquiring genetics that are appropriate for my region in zone four, where I have more winter than I do summer.
The growing season for me is at most 90 days, sometimes 95 days of a growing season, so I need to look for genetics that are appropriate for my little area and often that means acquiring things from other people and from other areas and countries.
And therefore, that might be the applicable answer then is that because of my colder climate, I have more easily gotten into things like breeding and genetics and some of this type of thing.
That was the same sort of thing that got me into plant breeding. Yes.
I might have 10 days longer growing season than Kelly does, but we both face the same kind of situation where we just buy seeds from the seed catalogs and expect them to thrive for us.
So this is, if I might just jump in a little bit here, this is something that in my early gardening years, 30 years or more ago, I thought, oh, I need heirloom. I need heirloom this and heirloom that. But that wasn't my answer.
It just was not my answer because an heirloom for there are no real heirlooms for northern Utah. The heirlooms come from the Midwest in the United States or who knows what, and they are not appropriate for me. So therefore, I needed to take matters into my own hands.
I didn't go about it purposely at the start. I stumbled into it year after year and found out through the school of hard knocks that why things worked, why things didn't work and what I needed to do.
And so I got into vegetable breeding more of just by chance and by intuition than I did by outright learning about genetics. So there's that.
So what was the first crop that you saved seeds from and started?
Okay, I've got a couple of different stories before I even really got deeply into potato onions. And I think they're applicable to everybody on the group that breeding or not necessarily breeding but selecting out of a gene pool is quite easy to do.
Because one of the first stories that I have is quite a revelation here, where I wanted to have a white carrot.
And I had seen them and heard of them and I wanted to grow some white carrots.
And so I looked and looked and I do believe it was from the Seed Savers Exchange.
But I don't know because it's been 20 years or more ago that I ordered some white carrot seeds and planted them in my garden had a whole row, probably 20 feet long of carrots that grew from these white carrot seeds.
I thought I need these carrots to go to seed and so in order to do carrots being biennials. I needed to overwinter them.
That's hard. Thanks for saying that because I didn't have much success overwintering them.
But here's what happened. I had a whole row 20 feet of carrots to overwinter.
And the next spring came along.
And the whole row was dead.
Except for one single solitary carrot that came back in full force and was beautiful. And I thought, oh, I've got a whole row here that's basically a failure in my book.
I'll never do anything with getting seeds from a white carrot.
And I was just about ready. I had the shovel in my hand and I was going to dig that carrot up and throw it away.
And I actually was standing over that carrot when the revelation came to me that, no, this one carrot of a whole row, this one carrot has some hardiness to it that can overwinter in Utah.
And that is exactly the carrot I want to save some seeds from.
So I let the one single solitary carrot go to seed.
And I had all kinds of seeds. I was amazed. I was amazed that I could have supplied carrot seeds to all my neighborhood easily because that one carrot gave that many seeds from the humble up on top.
And so I had seeds to plant out the following the third year, the following year. I planted those seeds and of course they sprouted.
And I was just thinking, boy, you know what, I've got some genetics now that are hardier than the white carrots that I got through the Seed Savers Exchange.
And so what happened then was a big learning experience for me, but it ended up being that it was a failure in the end because of those hardy, hardier white carrots, they were so woody that they were tasteless and they were not tender whatsoever.
And I thought, ah, does that mean that the hardier the carrot is, the tougher and more wild it is? And that was my assumption. But I learned a lot from that, that you can select out some genetics through just one little tiny experiment and see huge results from just one or two tries.
But another one was similar and that had to do with collards. And I quite enjoyed the collards. They're also being biennial, collards are. But in collards biennial second year, what happens is they then go to flower and then produce seeds.
But the little florets that come on those collards before the flowers open into their yellow flowers, they're quite tasty, very similar to broccoli.
And so I had quite a few collards plants and I wanted them to go to seed because I was a seed saver. I was a member of the Seed Savers Exchange for 30 years here, except for recently I haven't been.
But I thought now I'm collecting seeds, but these collards, they all seem to flower and go to seed all at the same time.
But look, this collard plant over here keeps producing little florets for days and days and for two or three weeks. And I want to have florets for an extended time. So when I went to select my seeds, I selected from the plants that had a longer bloom cycle.
And sure enough, then it's that easy that I picked out a trait that was applicable to me and found that it's quite easy to look into the gene pool of a crop and to start picking and choosing some genetics that you want, that work best for you in your garden, in your particular area, and then save seeds.
And this doesn't take anything more than just some common sense and some intuition. It doesn't take a lab. It doesn't take anything scientific much at all.
That was my introduction into when I stumbled onto potato onions, how it from that point and forth, it went somewhat easier because I had an introduction into selecting different land races of crops.
Tell us about your potato onions. How did you get into those? What happened?
That story is somewhat long. I will try to... We got a half hour still.
No, I could fill that whole half hour and I wouldn't want to do that. Okay, shortened version.
The shortened version is that potato onions that I obtained back in the days before I was even on the internet, and the internet was not really even a thing at the time I obtained these, potato onions don't have anything to do with potatoes.
They're totally allium. They're an onion, but they have a habit like potatoes. So you don't get potato onion seeds, you get potato onion bulbs from someone else or from some other source.
And you put that bulb in the ground and grow it like you would a potato start. And by putting one bulb into the ground, you get multiple onions from the one bulb because they're... anyway, keep the short story short.
So the potato onions are basically perpetuated asexually. So by saving one of the onions for next year, you plant that one onion, you can eat some of your crop and plant one of the onions next spring, and it will grow and give you five or six more onions from the one onion you put in the ground.
So these are vegetatively reproduced, which meant to me that I would need to put into my little root cellar enough onions for the next crop the next year.
But by the stroke of luck or fate or something, I was able to... now I know some of the reasons why I won't get into them because it's lengthens out the story here. I was able to get some potato onions to actually flower and go to seed.
I had never seen potato onions flower or go to seed. I had grown them for probably a decade and really quite enjoyed eating the potato onions because they stored so well and were so easy to put them back in the ground the next spring and grow my next crop.
But a group of potato onions that I put in the ground in the late fall overwintered and produced multiple seed heads for me. And me being a seed saver, I thought, this is funny. This has never happened before. I have never seen the potato onions go to flower, go to seed.
So I saved those seeds and planted them the following gardening season. And I ended up doing some experimenting that I had previously been educated about that I kept the original potato onions in one row of the garden and planted the seedlings of the seeds in another row right next to it.
I had my control crop so I could watch the difference. And the differences between the seedlings from the true seed and the cloned asexually produced potato onions in the row next to it, the differences were huge.
And I thought, what in the world have I got going on? It was a head scratcher to me. I went to the county extension agent, whom I know pretty well.
And I said, Jerry, what in the world have I got going on? He looked at me and he said, you're on your own, buddy. I have no idea what's happening there.
So I thought, if people don't know what's going on, I'm going to find out what's going on. So that was my introduction into breeding the potato onions.
I learned a lot over the years. And for those of you there in the group, I think Holly is posting a link to my story there on how I developed these new varieties of potato onions from being able to open up the genetic pool here.
I think she's posting that link. So I recorded that in writing and in some pictures. And I think it's like some 70 or 80 pages long. So it goes and goes.
But for those that are interested in reading that in detail, it's all written down on the Internet.
So in our group recently, we've been talking about breeding potato onions.
Really? So it was really fortuitous that you happened to be on the schedule. Oh, cool.
That occurred. So you've actually been talking about that then. So I don't need to go into all this elementary stuff with you after all.
Yes, you do. We love everything.
All right. A few people. In fact, I had a state extension agent tell me once that I was the world's authority on potato onions. And I said, no, I'm just a guy. And he said, have you ever met anybody? And I've had hundreds of people email me back and forth and whatnot.
He said, have you ever met anybody that knows more about potato onions than you? And I said, no. And he says, therefore, you are the expert.
And I'm going, how did I become an expert on something that I'm just playing around with?
Because you paid attention.
Because I paid attention. And so you have to go into it wanting to learn. One of the very first contacts I ever had was a fellow from England.
And he was not only just an avid gardener, but he was a genetics professor at a university in England. And he contacted me because I made the mistake of documenting some of my experiments and that on the internet.
Because I thought I need to write some of this down. Where do I do it? And so I put it on the internet and he found it. And so that was the beginning. He was like the first one that contacted me specifically. He being a geneticist and, of course, now retired from the university.
He told me, he said, he said, thank goodness that you were observant enough to get something that you had in your hands and start doing something with it. If you had not have saved some of those seeds, none of this ever would have happened.
So it's just a matter of being observant and a little bit inquisitive and trying to learn something on your own.
Well, see, one of the things that inspires me about you is your backyard gardener and your world renowned for one crop in a small little space.
In a small little space.
And if a hundred people were doing that, you know, exactly, we could cover all of the species that we're currently really interested in.
Yes. Can I jump in with another little story here? Because this has happened the last three or three and a half years here when you talk about saving different types of crops or even if there might not even be a food crop, saving some of these things.
One person in one area and one person in another backyard, another person somewhere else doing something that we could cover all of this.
There is a seed bank in Norway. I think it's Norway way up the north in the Svalbard seed bank.
There was a fellow in France, but he speaks German. His name is Philippe Heinemeyer, if anybody has ever heard of him.
Really? You know him? You know him?
Okay, so he contacted me and he said, hey, I have written to the seed bank and they have some potato onion, true seeds.
And he said, I didn't think that I was even able to order or get any seeds out of this big, huge seed bank.
He said, but lo and behold, they sent me 25 different varieties of seeds of potato onions. He says, do you want some of them? And I didn't know if I really wanted them or not because I thought 25.
I thought that's a project that's going to take some commitment. So I thought, but the opportunity is huge to be able to diversify the genetics of the potato onions that I've got going.
And I've got two other land races that are very good land races, but to add 25, I thought, I don't know about that.
So he sent the seeds to me from the seed bank in Norway. And so I've been growing those and they have a number. They don't even have a name to them. They're just a number, an accession number.
And so I grew these from true seed and kept track with markers in my garden, all the different 25 different varieties.
And I kept writings on these. And so I let them overwinter. I got seeds the second year. I had all kinds of seeds coming out my ears with Norwegian potato onion seeds.
So I went through the 25 different varieties and come to find out these Norwegian potato onions are just not very good.
I hesitate to even say that because maybe there's someone out there that thinks they're the greatest, but I don't think they're very good.
Can I tell you a story? Yeah, go ahead. People always want to send me seeds and I don't want them because they're junk.
The same thing, the varieties that I've been growing locally in my own garden do much better for me than all these grandma's super variety from far away and long ago.
But so the lesson came to me, although I could tell you a bit about these Norwegian potato onions, because I still got to, I'm growing them for a third year now.
I've selected some of the better ones, but I almost wonder whether I don't want some of those promiscuous pollen things floating around some of my better potato onions or not.
But I think, you know what, I'll give it one more year and just see what happens.
When I say that they're junk, they're not really junk. They're pretty hardy, but they're small and they have a little bit different traits to them here or there.
But they taste fine. They taste fine. But they're just small. They're just small. They're hard to process and hard to eat and cook with.
I want you to tell more about the first seeds that you grew of potato onions. You said there were several astonishing things.
I want to hear more what was so different about the clone versus the first seeds you grew.
Okay. All right, Holly, I will go into a little bit of detail on that, because the control row was all the same height. It was all the same color.
In other words, they were genetic clones of each other in the control group.
But when I got some seeds from those and planted the seeds, I had some taller ones. I had some shorter ones.
I had some that were greener, some that were more blue-green. So it was confusing in my head.
But the biggest difference that by far the, this is, I think, the concept that got me famous.
And I say that loosely. It got me well known.
Was that the onions that I grew from seed were the size of softballs. These things were, you could hardly get your hands around them.
They were that big. But yet my potato onions in the control group were just these small onions.
And I thought, wow, this is so cool that I can grow a huge potato onion from a little teeny tiny one.
And for me, the initial intrigue was that I got these huge onions. And I didn't know what to make of it.
So I thought, this is worth looking into then, because some of the onions were a whitish color.
Some of them were more of a golden color. Some were even almost verging into the pink color as far as the skin.
And so I wanted to put these big onions that I grew as a first year seedling into the ground so I could overwinter them
to see if they would act like potato onions and give me offsets.
And I could get maybe four or five more onions by overwintering one big bulb.
What happened then was that I found out through my own experience that onions really are biennial.
Even potato onions are biennial. Even though you can perpetuate them for years and years and years by cloning them,
they're still biennials. And why is that? So here's what happened.
I took that great big giant softball size onion, put it in the ground, thinking that I would get a whole nest of these great big giant onions.
And that did not happen. By putting one big onion into the ground, what happens is that there's growing points inside the base of that onion
where there's four or five different growing points and those little growing points then produce your subsequent crop that you're propagating vegetatively.
And they were smaller then after that. So that's the biennial nature of potato onions.
But then you need to select out the varieties that you want to clone after that.
But here's where it gets even more intriguing to me. And I was learning all this firsthand, questioning and scratching my head,
wondering what in the world I've got going on here, because to me it was confusing at first.
Even though the offsets from those great big giant huge onions were a lot smaller, those onions were still two or three times bigger than the control group.
There was still a size increase that just confused me, but I thought, wow, I've really developed something cool.
I'm really something because I've got a big onion, one that's actually even worth slicing into and using and cooking.
What happens though is that, and I found this out through some other greenhouse production experts and that I was inquiring of,
that the increase in size wasn't necessarily because of some genetic selection.
The increase in size happened because of a factor that I was totally unaware of.
And that was that it was a disease factor is what it is.
You take a bulb out of the ground and it's got some diseases from the soil on that bulb and you plant it the next time.
And that disease accumulates year after year.
And that is what degrades the size and the vigor of your crop over a matter of years.
It's a matter of keeping those diseases low, which keeps the size of your crop large.
So this now that's getting too deep. I won't go there. So the diseases are transmitted by the seeds.
Don't the seed. The seeds do not. OK.
When you start with the seed, you start all over with a clean product and therefore your vigor goes up.
But once you start cloning year after year, and it took me a decade to learn some of this,
that the propensity of a potato onion to flower and go to seed diminishes every year that you clone that.
In other words, it takes a decade or so. And that clone becomes old.
It just runs out of enough vigor to send up seeds anymore.
And so the original potato onions that I got 30 years ago, they didn't set seed.
I just could only perpetuate them asexually year after year.
But once I got a seed and was able to start with a clean, disease-free crop, then all of a sudden my size and vigor comes back.
And I guess this is very common when you start talking about potatoes.
Potatoes have to have a disease-free beginning when you plant.
I found out that garlic is much the same. And so I thought, here I am.
And therefore I found that a dip in a diluted bleach solution before planting can help some of that.
I don't know how much it's helping, but I do know that it helps a lot.
But as far as eliminating everything, it doesn't because the diseases are soil-borne.
They're already in the soil. So you're just doing your best to keep a clean crop from year to year.
But after a decade or so, the propensity to flower and to see that gene pool expressed goes down.
So it's a matter of taking some true potato onion seeds every year and starting a fresh crop
so that in the first few years you will consistently get seed heads.
But a few years later you will see very few seed heads until that trait just goes right away.
Is there any trick you used in those old clones to get them to flower?
There could be. And this I've done some reading and some research and some talking to extension agents
and other experts, greenhouse experts on some of this.
There are some tricks. In fact, one of them was a garlic expert that I communicated with by email.
So if those potato onions that you're wanting to perpetuate into another year's crop,
if there is some stress, that is one of the key factors.
If there's some stress at a certain point in its growth,
then it will have more of a propensity to give you a seed head.
So it was a totally random stress that got you started on this project.
Yes, it was. It was a totally random thing.
And like a geneticist from England said, you were lucky enough to see it and catch it.
And so now the world owes you a big thank you for what you have done.
Can we talk about storing potato or storing onion seeds? How long do they store?
OK, I only know a little bit about that, but I do know something.
And I will pass that along. Onion seeds are notorious for a short storage life.
And I've been aware of this through the years, so I'm always trying to have fresh seeds at hand.
But I have found that freezing the seeds in the freezer,
the germination is very good multiple years later.
So that is probably the answer to your question. I don't have specifics on that.
Just in general.
Because I don't know if you have an onion seed or a potato onion seed in a seed envelope,
just in a room somewhere. I don't know how long germination is good on that.
Germination for us as small scale growers might be different than germination for a seed company.
Yes.
Because I don't care in my garden if I have 10 percent germination after five years,
because I'm still getting germination. But a seed company can't sell that seed.
So the amount of loss of vitality, I don't have those figures because I haven't done any experimenting on that at all.
So we have a question coming in by Chant. If planting from seed every year, what's the benefit of potato onions over regular onions?
So there might not be, other than to keep the gene pool alive and diverse, because diversity is really where it's all about.
Tell me about the different varieties of onions you developed from that first.
OK, so I did develop some different varieties.
And some of the developments I've done have not come from that one original strain that I acquired from Roniger seed potatoes 30 years ago.
It took some because I got some different genetics going on from a strain out of Dakota, north or south,
and a strain from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
So I've got three different land races that I'm keeping my original one, the Dakota one and the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
They're all three of them are excellent potato onions, far better than those Norwegian ones that I'm playing around with right now.
But the old gardening books of the 1850s described at least three different types of potato onions.
And there was a white potato onion, there was a yellow or a brown, a yellow potato onion and a red potato onion.
And yet, when I first got into it, there were no white potato onions to be found anywhere commercially that I could find.
And there were no red ones. I could only find the yellow ones. And that's what I started with, was the yellow ones.
But I have found that in that original yellow potato onion strain, once I was able to get it to go to flower and opened up the gene pool to see what was in there,
I was able to get white ones and some pink ones too. So I thought, oh, okay, I want to develop a red one, a red one.
So I was able to actually bring back a resemblance of all three different types of potato onions that were recorded in old gardening books of the 1850s.
I thought, wow, it's just bringing them back from the dead, where those gardening experts were pretty much agreed that the white potato onions had gone extinct and the red ones had gone extinct.
And we were only left with the yellow ones. And so out of the yellow gene pool, I was able to get the white ones and started to get some red ones.
At least I could, you could definitely see the differences. So I thought, wow, I just need to keep going. I just need to keep going.
But other people sent me other potato onions. The Dakota one is a really nice golden to almost what reddish golden color.
And the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange one was also a darker color.
But once I got into the gene pool of that one, found out that there's some beautiful red ones that come from the land race that I got from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
The white potato onions, I'm still, I have found out through sad experience that the white potato onions that they talked about in the old gardening books, I really don't have a strain of white ones.
I have had white ones in the past and they don't store well. And they tend to be more of a multiplier onion instead of a potato onion.
And so there's some different things going on with the whites. And I haven't gone into developing anything white.
I've tried and I have been largely unsuccessful in getting something that's really great and worth a lot.
So by opening up the gene pools, you're able to mimic, if not duplicate, all of what's going on in the old gardening books of the 1850s before potato onions more or less went extinct.
And I think therefore that's why I think people think I'm famous because I'm the one that kind of brought these things back from the dead.
Can you tell us the difference in your mind between multiplier onions and potato onions?
Yes, I can. And maybe bulbing onions while we're on that topic? Bulbing onions, I really can't say anything authoritative there, but there are differences between multiplying onions and potato onions.
And the differences have to do with day length. And this is why playing around with the gene pool in your own backyard becomes so significant, is because you're undoubtedly at a different latitude than I'm at.
And onions being day length sensitive here. Okay, so I'm getting off on a tangent and I need to get back to the difference between multiplying onions and potato onions.
A potato onion is a true biennial onion that is day length sensitive.
And a multiplier onion is an onion that really is not day length sensitive. It just multiplies whenever the conditions are right.
It will give you, there is a potato onion, they call it a potato onion, that is really more of a multiplying onion than it is a potato onion.
And this type of onion is quite well known, at least on the internet among some people, and I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's called I-E-Toy or something.
And it is an onion that was brought over by the original Spanish, I don't know what you call them, it came over like in the 1500s, 1600s to the Americas and introduced this onion to a group of American Indians down in New Mexico area.
So it's called the I-E-Toy or whatever, I-I-T-O-I onion.
And it was kept by the O'odham Indian tribe. And this onion is quite mild and good tasting.
But it has been perpetuated clear from the 1500s or 1600s here in the Americas, and people call it a potato onion.
I have found that it's more of a multiplier onion than it is a potato onion, because it doesn't seem to be day length sensitive at all.
It just starts multiplying when the conditions are right. And in the fall, it stops growing, multiplying and will sit under the snow for months.
In the spring when it gets favorable again, it starts multiplying some more and it multiplies just because. But a potato onion, here is the big difference between a potato onion and a bulbing onion and a multiplying onion, is that a potato onion is a true biennial.
You start with a true seed the first year, it gives you top growth, and then it gives a bulb that can go dormant in the winter.
And then the second season in the spring, it will send up a seed stalk.
And then basically, like a carrot or a collard or like an onion, it does not grow the third year, it's dead. Because it's done its genetic duty of reproducing itself.
So a multiplying onion just goes and goes. But a potato onion here, what happens is you start from a seed or you start from the bulb in its second year.
It starts growing in the spring. And as the days get longer, the top growth keeps growing and growing.
And then the summer solstice comes along, which is around June 20th, which is about right now. And the days will start becoming shorter.
When the days become shorter, then that is a stimulus to a potato onion that the top growth can stop and the bulbs start growing underneath the soil.
And the bulbs underneath the soil grow in the same proportion that it had top growth before the solstice.
And so the difference between a bulbing onion and a potato onion is that it is day length sensitive, where a multiplying onion does not seem to be day length sensitive.
Okay, thank you.
Tell them about the seed stalk, the difference between a potato onion and a bulbing onion, how it comes out of the onion or not.
Oh, okay. So that's getting somewhat more into a longer story.
So I noticed that at my place. Yeah. Sometimes if I have a bulbing onion, the flower stalk will come straight up out of the middle of the potato or out of the middle of the onion.
But on some of them, the flower stalk comes up around the side of the onion.
And I like that trait better, I think. Yes, yes, I think it's a desirable trait.
Now, you mentioned specifically, it seems that they come up out of the middle or out of the side.
Have you actually taken some of those onions that you think come up out of the middle and peel back some of the outer layers to see that seed stalk looks like it comes out the middle, but it actually once it gets under the skin goes around the side to the base.
I don't think. Yes, because that is what happens sometimes that the seed stalk that seems people think comes out of the middle of the onion really isn't.
Okay, it is just wrapped that seed stalk that comes up the side is wrapped by a few thin layers of non edible covering.
So, getting back to the Norwegian onions that I see was cross pollination I want happening here because the Norwegian potato onions that is where they differ.
They do send up a seed stock right through the middle of the bulb. So here's what's fun about the Norwegian ones. You can take the base of the potato onion at the roots and cut it with a knife, and you can pull that seed stock right up.
Out through the middle, and then you're left with a onion that has a hole in the middle where the seed stock came up.
And that hole in the middle does not exist in my potato onions from the Green Mountains land race, or the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange land race or the Dakota land race, they always come up the side.
Nice.
Nice. Even though it looks like they come up the middle of the bulb, but they're actually just under the surface of that out layer. Nice. So they're easier to process an onion for eating that way.
So when we're planting seeds from potato onions, is that something should be done in the spring or can it be done anytime of the growing season.
It okay, this is where the day length sensitive part comes in, it needs to be done in the spring because the growth needs to happen before the summer solstice.
Okay. Yeah, and where a multiplier onion it might be you might could get away with doing it anytime of year. Okay, so it'd be too late to plant potato onions. Yes, yes it's too late.
Right, we're at least in the northern hemisphere. Yeah, we're coming up on the end of the hours any other questions from out there that we'd like to address before we end.
So that's for the same for if you're in England, this person has seen in England is it too late to plant. Yeah.
Because the because of the in the northern hemisphere the the the days will soon be getting shorter. Now the seeds will sprout. But unless you have grow lights or something, then then it's too late you have to artificially know that you're have a day length issue, which is one, I maybe should emphasize that.
If you take potato onion true seeds and plant them in like Arizona, you will be able to find in that gene pool that there is some differences in day length sensitivity versus whether you're in Canada.
So the day lengths do change according to latitude. And by see if you got bulbs from me in northern Utah. I have found out that they just don't perform in Texas or in Florida, or something because of the day length.
So you would need to start your potato onions from true seed, and then pick and choose from that gene pool seeds that reacted better to your own latitude and day length.
Right. Okay, I have one more question. I planted clones from you Kelly in my garden last fall. So they came up this spring, they're out there growing when we walk out there I'll show them to you. Okay, but will they go to see this year because I planted them last fall or
next year. They will go to seed every year, but every year that they do go to see those seeds will diminish yearly, year after year to where I get this year I save and start them from seeds like in December, ready to plant in the spring.
Yes, yes. And if you don't want to plant those true seeds that you saved this year. If you don't have plans on planning them next year then you probably need to freeze those seeds so that the seeds would have a better germination rate in a year that you want to start
again from true seed.
I'd like to thank Kelly for being on. Thank Julia and Holly for technical support. If you have a couple of minutes to stick around. Holly's going to walk outside with her camera and she's going to show us a quick tour of her kitchen garden.
Okay, we're going to walk out into that garden. So, last year this was my seed bed and I grew parsnips to go to seed, and then a lot of seed fell on the ground and they just fall into the ground.
And they just volunteered I didn't even know they were there but they came up this year.
And that's one person that went to seed last year and it came back this year. I've never had that happen before.
And these are some jokes, I was gonna say Jerusalem artichokes. Yeah, so we planted to last year and then this is all from two little tubers last year.
Yeah, they won't go away ever.
I stopped breeding sun roots because they won't go away ever.
Okay, can you hear us. Yeah.
We'll go over to the onions and garlics first, because that's what we've been talking about.
These are my potato onions.
These are garlics.
The little garlics were from Joseph's, and I planted them in the fall as bullbills and they came up.
So these, but these are all potato onions and then I planted cabbage from seed in my garden.
They're not very big but they'll grow.
So can you tell the difference of them by looking at them.
No, not for sure. The difference will be more when the bulbs start to come. Yes, you should be able to tell some difference with the, when the bulbs start to form.
These are my fava beans and they're starting to blossom.
And I planted kale last year to try to overwinter but it all winter kale they had two collards that made it there at the other end.
So these are just all potato onions coming down here.
And a few garlics.
They don't look great.
They're growing, but these are starting to get seeds on them. Yes they are.
And then I've got beets. These windered over and they're going to be my seed crop this year for my beets.
And these are just cabbages in here. That's my radishes that I saved seed last year and radish dropped on the ground and it just volunteered.
Wow. And here's some of my great fungi that likes to grow in my garden.
I don't eat them, but I let them grow and they.
And that's probably because you've got so much bark mulch. Yeah, the chips and then this is my two collards that I guess they're going to go to seed.
All my other kale died and all my other collards didn't make it. And then these are fava beans. So those fava beans are cool looking.
So they're gonna, they did really good last year.
Okay, there's cabbage behind you.
So Holly lives in the field.
So I have peas. My rows are 70 feet long. There's squash and a little bit of kale coming up. Let's walk up through here.
This is my cabbage that you guys know about my land rice I'm starting.
It's really still just, these are the first crop that I overwintered.
And they're all the same variety so it's not really a land race yet but it's my first experience to get cabbage to overwintered so I could actually save seed.
And I have about 20 of those in that row.
So they made it.
Got parsnips and turnips.
Very nice that they made it through the winter. These are my true seed potatoes.
Last year I planted them as seeds.
This year I planted them as clones I just had them in my basement.
And I planted them this spring and they're all starting to grow really good.
And my beans.
And there's my rhubarb.
The rhubarb is the Morgan Valley heritage rhubarb.
This is my maximus.
And so we're really far behind some of you guys that have been, you're probably think oh my gosh but it will make it and produce they're just so small but that's our climate.
So just little lettuce and mustard and in here is celery but they're so small I've never grown it before.
So I don't know what it's going to do.
Yeah, right there. Yeah, so I've got a little patch celery it's got to be weeded, find weed, lobster grow.
And then these are just regular onions that looks so beautiful Holly so big and no weeds.
And so I just got these little one. This is my deal.
Can you see it.
Yes, we see it good.
I have a call trying to come in and I don't know how to reject it.
That's my deal.
This is giant watermelon radishes.
I haven't pulled any yet I don't know how they're doing.
Never heard of those before.
They haven't bulb yet. They're just okay. They've got a lot of green.
And this is my other patch of fathers.
So the ones I showed you first are the ones I got from are going to see the exchange thing that we did.
So we'll see how they turn out this one here is just a bunch of different ones that I bought different Baba beans from everywhere I could find and I just planned a few and you can see some are tall and some are short.
And I plan them on the opposite side of the garden just so I could see what was happening with those.
And then these are elderberries.
Holly temperatures at your place. That's it.
So now we'll come out.
I do have a couple fruit trees in here but just careful my temperatures. Yes, it is temperatures that Holly's place around 50 at night, and maybe 75 in the daytime.
So, rather cool.
Those are peach trees.
Yeah.
So if I show it again in the fall or I'll put some pictures up on our discourses.
But it'll be more beautiful later. It's just starting to write Do we have our next month's meeting.
Next month is going to be Shane Simonson is going to meet with us in Australia. I did an interview with Shane recently on his podcast and so that will be a very interesting.
See all about from that.
Bye. Thank you very much.
It was very interesting.
Thank you. Bye.
Bye