Landrace potato onions

Faber vanmolkot wrote:I got my hands on some potato onions landrace steeds ( not from my region )
I have 3 variaties and they are Growing nicely.

If i get them to flower and seed ( does not happen often i Read)
I would like to "breed" my own landrace.

Do You have Any pointers specific for potato onions?

The very first criteria for a landrace in my garden, is that it must produce seeds.

If you are starting with pollinated seeds, that is a good sign, because it means that the starting varieties produce seeds at least sometimes. And the better news is that, as we grow sporadically seeding species from seeds, we are selecting for seediness. Therefore, in future generations, it will become easier to grow the species from seed.

I have observed seediness increase in other species that are typically grown as clones: potatoes, garlic, sweet potato. I have made seediness a primary selection criteria on any crops that I grow. If they are not reproducing from pollinated seeds, then their ability to become locally-adapted is severely limited.

The inmates are running the asylum in my onion patch. Potato onions from two sources seed readily or rather what ever they are now, does. They were mixed with Lofthouse landrace onions form seed, multiple cultivars of bunching onions, a wild onion called Allium canadense and lots of onions from the grocery store including big sweet onions and shallots. I don't pay any attention to day length requirements or anything else like that. I just plant seeds, bulbs and bulbils all together and let winter select the hardy ones.  

I don't harvest and store onions as commonly done, I just harvest leaves, bulbs or bulbils or whatever is available at the time all year long. This has been going on for years, last couple of years I have been culling any bulbs or bulbils that are very hot in flavor, as we prefer a nice sweet mild onion. I cull those bulbs but still plant the seeds. I'm not even sure the Allium canadense is the same species but this year it is producing some off types, same great flavor but different looking bulbils.

Also this year it looks like I might get some seed from my old walking onions, after multiple failed attempts I never got seed from them before so don't know what's up with that except maybe something I've heard of but know little about, called epigenetics. It's one of those cases where isolating an exact cause or explanation is irrelevant to me, all I care really care about is what goes in the stew pot.

It's been I think 8 years now since I discovered about 20 sweet potato seeds and two or three sprouted. I harvest them in the thousands now and germination just direct seeded now exceeds 50% instead of the original 2 or 3.

I even have sweet potato weeds from seeds lost the year before but I still have lots of work to do in eliminating those that either don't make usable roots or don't bloom. Over 1/2 of new seedlings do both but I want to up that to 75% or more.