Potato onions

[nicolas]

Here is a thread to talk about potato onion breeding projects

Fertility and productivity had been unlocked from Potato onions by Kelly Winterton some years ago. On can get the all story in these two documents :
Booklet: All About Potato Onions
Potato Onion gardening journal for 2013 (continuation of above Booklet)


His crosses get a lot of diversity, and the question is wether it is due to cross pollination or embedded in the genetic in "old" potato onions. We are at least a fex members of this forum to get seeds or fertile potato onions from Kelly, so it would be great to see what can be done from them.

Here is a picture of potato onions i've got from Kelly :


There is already a great diversity : white mountain is shaped like garlic, and gold mountain act like it is mentioned in some old literature (a small bulb give a big one, and a big one several small). And Kelly has a strain which make bulbils too.

[Graham]

I heard about Kelly's onions a couple of years ago and they really peaked my interest. I ordered a few potato onion accessions from IPK Gatersleben and grew them out to see which ones grew best and flowered more readily in my climate. Having made my selections I crossed the them with a store bought red onion. The red onion turned out to be male sterile, so I couldn't use the potato onions as the seed parents as planed. But I did get plenty of hybrid seed from the red onion, and that was grown out last season.

The seedlings didn't get the best start as I had nowhere to plant them when they were ready for transplanting, so they languished in their pots until I decided to to just plant them up in some containers and see what they did.

And this is what they look like now (Forgive the poor photography).




As you can see, some of them stalled, others are still growing despite the winter now being upon us (these ones are actually like a larger bulbed Welsh onion at the moment), and one (see the picture below) has formed a small bulb.





It's not very clear in the picture, but the bulb measures around 40mm. Nothing like the size of Kelly's F1's, but I've never been great with onions.

I cant say at this point what these plants will be like in terms of growth habit or perenniality. But hopefully this coming season will reveal that, so I'll have to update later.

Hopefully I'll have a new potato onion amongst them.

[ottawagardener]

Following this with interest. Actually it's spurred my nascent quest to collect more 'shallots' from seed. My common yellow multipliers typically flower. I've not tried growing out the seeds however. On a reverse note, onions that I overwinter often nest the second year. I'm suspecting something climatic involved.

[nicolas]

Interesting experiments @graham !

I didnt think of male sterility, i'll take that into account in choosing for a male A. cepa to cross.

Does someone think of a good candidate for some unusual quality ?

Can you tell me if you made something special to hand pollinate / avoid unwanted pollination ?

[nicolas]

Here is my only bulb i got from seed sofar :


It is interesting in that it has a pink skin and none of Winterton's have this characteristic as far i remember correctly (or Winterton judged they worth not the mention)

[oxbowfarm]

I rec'd some bulbs of Green Mtn from Kelly in the fall of '12 and I fall planted them. They flowered abundantly for me and I harvested a really decent quantity of seed.

Kelly also sent me some Green Mtn. seed. I only managed to get two plants into the soil, one was a white skin which had low storage ability and rotted. The other is a yellow/brown skin that divided into three bulbs before I harvested it. I plant to spring plant them quite early. They are getting a little soft as I have had them stored in far too warm of a location, I may pot them up rather than lose them.

[starry]

Green mountain potato onion seedlings.
Looking forward to seeing what characteristics each of these onions will have.

[nicolas]

Mine are at this stade too.

[philip]

I am also growing potato onions from seed obtained from Kelly Winterton and have currently 20+ young seedlings. I have also managed to get hold of a potato onion strain from Ireland that i am trying this year. They are not very big though and nests range from 2 to 9 onions. Can PO's be improved by consistently replanting the biggest tubers?

[robertb]

Fascinating. I've had problems growing shallotts, but I seem to have fixed that now. I tried the last few miserable things in a raised bed last year, and they grew like mad. It seems to have been the waterlogging that was causing problems. This year I have enough decent bulbs for a bed of them. I've no idea of the variety; they produced a few flowering stems this year, and like a dummy I nipped them off. Next time I'll try and get some seed!

I'm wondering about the relationship between potato onions and walking onions; does anyone have any idea?

[Graham]

Well the results are in from my crosses. They all flowered this season, and as you'd expect they appear to be male sterile. The 40mm bulb formed three bulbs of that were 25-30mm and a flower stem from the center of the cluster. The rest looked to be just forming flower stems from the center of the bulb like a biannual onion, but as the flowers died back it was evident that the flower stem had grown from the main bulb and a secondary bulb had been formed to the side of the stem, much like the potato onion parents.

I'll try to grow out these onions in more favorable conditions next year to better gauge their performance. But for now I can say that the potato onion's growth habit and perenniality look to be fairly dominant.

I didn't manage to make the cross between these seedlings and A. fistulosum I'd planed as the flowering times were out of sink. But I still hope to make that cross in the future.

As for the relationship between potato onions and walking onions; I'm not sure there is a particularly close relationship. They don't have much in common with regard to growth habit or their method of reproduction. Potato onions have more in common with shallots, but I'm not convinced they're quite the same thing.

[philagardener]

I grew several of Kelly's varieties next to some shallots this year and they were virtually indistinguishable to my eye. They flowered at the same time, and I made the effort to transfer pollen both ways, so we will see what develops!

[philip]

This is a picture of my potato onions flowering. I left them in the polytunnel over winter and they almost all started to flower. At the back are seed-grown plants from Kelly's seed. In front of that is a row of potato onions i got from ireland also running to seed. I hope that the irish strain is not the same one Kelly started out with and that they will cross. One plant at the back with the largest flower and the tallest spike didn't divide at all but just went straight to flowering. There is also one that is not flowering at all among the seedlings from Kelly's seed so i am seeing a lot of variation. However i am a bit disappointed about the size of the seed-grown potato onions. They are very small. I am getting nothing close to the results Kelly writes about in his e-book. 
There are close to 100 flower heads i counted so i should get a massive amount of seed. In front is a white fishbox with po's grown from seed this year that are screaming to be planted. Looking at the nests i can see the different colours of the onions. I can't wait to start off all the bulbs of the seed-grown plants next year spring to compare them. I am wondering if they will flower again and whether that's a good thing. Once a better larger cultivar suited to my climate is found i don't need it to flower anymore. When i moved the plants that i had grown from Kelly's seed into my tunnel last autumn i noticed, like i said before the small size of the onions. Some didn't even seem to have any bulb but looked more like a spring onion.
I think that if you want them to go to seed plant them in autumn or keep the plants going in a tunnel like i did and if you just want them to grow and divide plant them in spring.
It will be interesting to see what sizes and colours i will get next year. I have about 25 new seed-grown types for trial next year and a ton of seed in the making.

[philip]

I sowed my PO seeds and replanted all my seed-grown bulbs.

I had left the onions in a crate outside under an open shed and covered to exclude light.

To my surprise nearly all of them are flowering again now. While i was very happy when they flowered at first i am now getting a bit annoyed by it, because the goal is an improved non-flowering potato onion variety or several. Flowering is great and necessary to get seed but otherwise not useful i think.

Have i gotten myself a potato onion "landrace" that flowers all the time now?

[philagardener]

Almost all of mine (autumn planted) have bloomed this year too. Don't know if the crazy weather we have had is to blame.