By all accounts the Winters here in northern NSW are too warm for standard bulbing onions, but the good news is there are other types we can grow, namely the bunching onions and shallots. That’s extra good news since I preferred to cook with shallots in Sydney, but they came at a premium price compared to ordinary brown onions, and of course here I can buy brown onions cheaply anytime.
So to clarify, as there’s some confusion in terms used, shallots are the long bulbs, either golden or red, that are especially used in French and Indochinese cooking. The bunching onions are characteristic of Japanese cuisine, and are like green spring onions or scallions, with no bulb but a stem you can slice up.
In the supermarket this morning they had these very big shallots, and I’ve seen that now is the time to start them from setts, so I picked up 7 to give them a go. They’ll go in a prepared, limed bed, just deep enough to sit them firmly while they root.
Meanwhile I sowed some leeks and bunching onions back at the end of May, and had a modest germination. They went in before I bought some lime, so may have been disadvantaged by acid soil, but I’ve tried to remedy that by watering in some suspended lime. I decided to test the available cultivars from a local seed merchant, and got ‘Onion bunching’, ‘shallots red stem welsh’, ‘shallots bunching deep purple’, and ‘shallots white lisbon’. There are plenty of other types to try, and I notice another merchant has ‘japanese’ bunching onions, which may or may not be the same as the red stem or purple ones. It’s really a case of finding out what grows well right here.
As my planting area was small and hastily prepared, I tried another sowing in a seed tray in some sand. They have come through nicely, and seem to benefit from being under shade cloth. They can go out when they get a bit bigger.