What is my Welsh Onion flower doing?

What on Earth is my Welsh Onion flower doing?

It flowered last year, alone, and didn't set a single seed.

This year there are two of them, but the other one isn't open yet. I put the pot they are in next to the White Lisbon onions which are just beginning to flower in the hope that if I couldn't get pure Welsh Onions, which are Allium fistulosum, then I might at least get an interspecies hybrid with the White Lisbon onions, which are Allium cepa. That hybrid is essentially what the Egyptian Walking onion is.

There are also some chives flowering not far away.

But what is happening to the flower? Are onions supposed to do this? I haven't dared to investigate what's happening any closer in case I mess it all up but it kinda looks as though seeds have germinated and started to grow right from the flower. Which bearing in mind the wet weather we've had recently I guess could be a possibility. Or are there teeny bulbils down there? Could it be because it's crossed with the White Lisbon onion and the resulting seed has a mind of its own? Or is this behaviour perfectly normal and I just haven't noticed before because I don't usually grow onions with flowers.

My walking onions do that.  I don't know why a normal onion would. Looks nifty.

Hi Burra,
My leeks and garlic have done that once. With one leek flower, I let it go. Miniplants grew out of it. I carefully picked the mini plants and planted them in a planter. I stopped when I had 400. There were still many more, so I passed the flowerhead on to someone else, who passed it on after she picked out as many as she wanted, and so on.

As I understand it is pretty normal in the allium familly. When the flowerstalk flops over onto the soil, a new bunch of alliums will grow there.

Somehow I am not sucessful at further propagation. Does anyone know how it should be done?

Nynke Muller wrote:With one leek flower, I let it go. Miniplants grew out of it. I carefully picked the mini plants and planted them in a planter. I stopped when I had 400.

Oh now that is fascinating. I was hoping it was going to turn out to be something like that but I hardly dared hope and thought I was just seeing what I wanted to see, especially as I'd just bought some Egyptian Walking Onions and had them very much on my mind.

I'll try to take some more photos tomorrow to check on progress and prepare a pot to start transplanting babies to, just in case...

I took another photo this morning, slightly more from above.

It's not much different, but it does seem that more of those little green stalks are growing. It would be so cool if they really are little plants.

I'll take more photos every few days and report progress.

I asked Stephen Barstow, author of Around the World in 80 Plants and he told me this...

Yes, many Alliums occasionally produce small bulbils like yours which you can try to grow on. Other Alliums always produce bulbils - like hardneck garlic, some types of leek, Allium vineale etc.

I looked up the wikki page for Allium vineale, also known as crow garlic.  Apparently the umbels of crow garlic usually have several small bulbils and may or may not also have flowers. Apparently the seeds seldom set and propagation is usually by accomplished by bulbils getting knocked off and growing into new plants.



Onions are strange creatures...

Does this count as demi-ace?