May 9, 2018

Over the course of years, I have found a number of veggies, mainly greens, the length of harvest can be extended if you harvest a selected portion of a plant instead of the whole plant.

A decent list of these plants is chard, kale, spinach, boc coy, lettuce, and green onions.

Chard and kale are usually seen in the store as single leaves. The remaining veggies are sold as whole plants.

By harvesting single leaves there can be an extended harvest through the winter. During the winter it is much easier for a plant to regrow a leaf as opposed to grow a whole new plant from a seed.

It has been an education “thingy” for customers to get comfortable with boc choy and spinach as a bunch of leaves.

It was a few years back that I tried cutting the tops of green onions from the root. By leaving the root in the ground a new onion plant will grow. What I find to happen, where one top was cut three or four onions come up from the base. I have also found that by cutting back the green onion that has bolted and is in full bloom, cutting off the top resets the green onion to a vegetative state 100% of the time. This is the only veggie I have found this to be true. This may be true because I use bunching onion seeds as opposed to bulb onion seeds.

I used to always sell out of green onions when I harvested whole plants. Now I am running a surplus.

As a gardener this is an amazing discovery, never having to sow successions for green onions.

As a marketing “thingy” this does not work. It baffle’s me. For funzies  I decided to harvest some green onion whole plants and then mix with the topped ones, to my surprise they sold out at market. And they continue to do so. Very interesting!!! Marketing confuses me. As mentioned above when I harvest tops there are more onions that come up from the base, so this could be sustainable, harvesting fewer whole plants than cut tops.

Now is the question what do folks do with the roots when they chop up green onions? Is it totally a recognition thing? “this is how green onions should look”. I would think unless someone is composting vegetable matter, that not having to “deal” with green onion roots would be a positive thing. It, in my mind, is a better deal for the customer, where there is no waste.

I would really like to here from anyone, am I missing something?