My Favorite Varieties: Onions, Shallots & Garlic

A staple of every home and commercial kitchen. I loathe the moment when my winter stash of onions dwindles, though we do grow enough onions for fresh eating about 80% of the year. And that’s definitely something to celebrate.

We’ve been growing onions from seed since about 2004, though not annually. With our small city gardens, they were an every few years kind of crop, something I enjoyed growing but it never completely wowed me. Prior to that we grew garlic in Oregon the first fall of our first large garden (planted in 2001). We grew it two years in a row until we moved to Minnesota, and similar to how I’ve sometimes squeezed it in here, we planted it outside our main vegetable beds.

Onions

While we’ve trialed many different yellow and red onions over the years, I came back to the same storage variety: Patterson for many years. This is a classic yellow full sized storage onion. It performed most consistently for us for over a decade and seems to be a hybrid that’s stayed the test of time.

We’ve also tried Ailsa Craig and Yellow of Parma as alternatives though they don’t store nearly as long. I’m pretty sure that Patterson is the onion I’ve been growing for over a decade, possibly since 2004, though I don’t have records that go back that far.

However, a few years ago in my ongoing quest to explore open pollinated varieties, I’ve started to grow more and more open pollinated onions. Red Long of Tropea, a fresh-eating onion from southern Italy is a favorite for all our summer risottos. I’ve also completely changed my storage onion favorite from Patterson to Newburg from Adaptive Seeds. It stores just as well, and it’s open pollinated. I’m even going to try and get some smaller ones to flower this year in the garden and see if I can save viable seed, a fun multi-year project.

For red onions, we’ve grown Red Hawk, Red Wing, and this past year, Rossa di Milano. The first two are hybrids while the latter is an open-pollinated variety. While all claimed to be excellent storage onions, we didn’t find that red onions store for nearly as long as yellow. However, I am loving the Rossa di Milano onions so far this fall and plan to grow them again next year. Red Wing we tried for a few years and weren’t impressed with their short-term storage qualities so we no longer. grow it and Red Hawk was a one year trial and we quickly cut it from our grow list.

For fresh eating, I’ve started to grow a third type of onion: Red Long of Tropea. This uniquely shaped heirloom is another wonderful offering from Johnny’s Seeds (where I almost always source my onion seeds). An elongated red onion that instead of depleting our storage onions or young shallot bulbs, I grew in a 4×4 area reserved for fresh eating. We started to enjoy these around the Fourth of July and continued to eat them until September, so this was a wonderful “produce section” of the garden that made for a 5pm garden excursion to harvest our dinner vegetables most nights.

I’ve only growing onions from seed. It just made sense to me to start from a seed. Part awe, and part curiosity, I felt I needed to know an onion from seed. Yes, I’m seed-entrenched, preferring always to start things from seed over sets. It was a crop we didn’t continue to grow annually until 2017 when we planted garlic outside our deer fence.

Shallots

Like with my Patterson, I have a favorite, tried and true shallot variety: Conservor. I’ve also tried Zebrune from Baker Creek Seeds back in 2019 or so, but since our onions are grown largely for storage, we quickly returned to Conservor.