Growing Green Onions Indoor Right From Seed To Harvest! Green Onions are an awesome staple in most gardens, easy to germinate, even easier to maintain, harvest, and eat! Treated as a perennial in most climates, people often want to try their hand at growing these guys indoors. Well, let me tell you… it’s just as easy! In this article, let me show you all things you need to know to grow your own Green Onions indoors, any time of the year, hassle and maintenance-free!
Green onions planted outdoors at least six to eight weeks before your first fall frost will likely give you a full autumn crop and on top of that provide more bounty next year as a perennial spring herb, even in temperate regions, that’s pretty hard to be.
But in this article we’re going to assume that outdoors is out of the question and we’re going to turn our focus to growing the most epic green onions indoors and it all starts with the seeds.
Green onions are readily started from the cut root ends of already harvested onions.
Start with Seeds to grow green onions indoors
Green onion seeds are collected when the flower heads dry out and expose the relatively large black seeds contained in those attractive humbles. If you missed out on collecting the seeds this year or you know you’re just starting out your green onion operation now, the seeds are very inexpensive and they’re readily available, pretty much all year round.
With our green onion seeds in check, let’s talk about pots and soil.
Pots and Soil requirements to grow green onions indoors
Green onions are very shallow rooted and thus very undemanding of pot size. Coupled with the fact that one of the names that they’re commonly referred to is bunching onions. Don’t dwell on the pot size selection too long.
I’m gonna go with a typical one-gallon nursery pot to grow green onions indoors. You know in terms of depth it’s probably overkilled for green onions and you know if you wanted to save soil and you wanted to save money I would suggest going something a little more shallow or you could build your own mini wood planter boxes.
Really these guys are so undemanding with what they grow in, just get creative with it.
For your soil, green onions do best in a well-drained mixture but yet retains moisture. Because their roots are so shallow they lack the ability to go very deep to hunt for water. So you’re gonna want a sandy loam type mixture with high organic content.
What this usually means is a typical commercial potting or container mix with about 10 sand added. I make my own soils to avoid having to buy the commercial mixes but as long as you have quality organic soil that drains well, is ph neutral, and has no salt or boron buildup you’re gonna do fantastic.
So now that we’ve talked about pots and soil let’s go ahead inside and plant our seeds.
Planting Green Onion Seeds
Planting green onion seeds are super easy. I start by filling up my pot all the way to the top with that soil mixture that we talked about.
I then compress that down about 20 and soak my pot from below for about two hours.
Onion seeds, green onions in particular are very sensitive to drying out, resulting in poor germination or worse spindly shoots.
So let’s go ahead and make sure that our pot is good and soaked to avoid these problems.
Pre-soaking your soil from below is super easy and it ensures that your soil takes up all the water that it can hold. At the same time, it doesn’t wash the nutrients out the bottom like watering from above wood.
You can notice, how fast that soil gobbles up the water.
Sowing Time
With our soil nice and wet go ahead and spread the seeds around right on top. Try to space them about an inch apart, but we can easily thin them later so don’t stress too hard about this part.
Cover them up with about an inch of that same soil mixture and set them aside where the ambient temperature is at least 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Germination takes roughly a week at these temperatures (Germination in 5-9 days).
Maintenance
When the shoots reach about two to three inches tall you can go ahead and thin the pot if need be.
Keep the pot lightly watered and if you have a fairly light mulch you can go ahead and use that too to control the evaporation.
It’ll take about two to three months for the green onion plants to mature and be ready for harvest.
Harvesting Green Onions
However when you harvest the shoots from the outside leaving the younger inner ones to grow and keep producing you’re going to ensure that you have an ever-ready supply of green onions from the same pot for seasons to come.
Green onions are relatively free of pests. So if you start with a clean quality organic potting mixture you could conceivably grow green onions indoors exclusively, you know pretty much trouble-free.
For those who are space-challenged green onions miniature cousin chives are just as easy to grow and can be done using the same methods that we discussed today all be it on a smaller scale.
Green onions are one of my all-time favorite crops. Coupled with the fact that green onions don’t take up hardly any space and they can be grown indoors pretty much any time of the year, it just makes me want to grow them that much more. Hey if you guys have any other scallion growing tips make sure to share them in the comments down below.
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