As a followup to Rebsie’s post ‘Anthocyanin: the secret behind black berries‘, the BBC has an article about a study done on the subject in the US.

Here is the Sea Kale plant going to seed:

The plant has large round seeds about 3-4mm in diameter.

This is a plant I found growing wild after a tip from someone on the ‘Afsluitdijk’, the main dike that keeps large parts of Holland dry including Amsterdam.

It’s a Brassica, in the same family as plants like cabbage, kale and turnips. The leaves can be boiled and eaten in a similar way as kale.

While it is considered a rare plant, and in some areas is protected, it is not considered endangered. In fact, if you do find it growing, it will probably be in a large colony of plants. Considering 1 or 2 leaves is a large serving, you should be able to harvest enough for yourself while leaving plenty behind for others. I understand in the UK it is protected in the sense you need to have the landowner’s permission to harvest it. It grows in many areas along the coast.

It will also grow in gardens in many climates. If anyone would like to try this, let me know and I’ll collect some seeds for you. I’m sorry the seeds are too big to send to the US or anywhere else their import may be restricted. It should be no problem to send them anywhere in Europe.

Taste

I wouldn’t say I was very fond of the taste. It had a strong sea taste, the same as the smell of the area I harvested it from.

I would say this is good ‘foodie’ food. By putting a small amount in an otherwise complicated meal, it offers an interesting taste and lets you tell a story about how you found it growing in the wild and harvested it specially for that meal.

I don’t plan to grow it in my garden, and if I want more I know where to go and get it.

In my previous post on perennial onions I talked about two different kinds, the Yellow Potato Onion and the Egyptian Walking Onion. Now the growing season is over, and it’s time to offer some thoughts on all the different kinds I grew this year.

To be honest, I had a worse than usual problem with weeds in the garden this year, and this may have reduced the size of the onions and contributed to some of the problems I mention below.

Nesting Onions

Also called multiplier or potato onions, this kind of onion forms clusters of new onions in the ground after being planted. I grew 3 of this type of onion this year:

1. Yellow Potato Onion
2. Belgian Shallot
3. Greeley Bunching Onion

This kind of onion can grow either by doing the same thing each year or it can have a 2 year cycle. In my previous post I explained how the Yellow Potato Onion has a 2 year cycle, one year they form ‘nests’ and the larger bulbs split into several smaller ones and the other year the smaller bulbs grow big.

While you can eat the greens of these onions as they grow, I didn’t find any of them particularly special. Mostly they were just small and uninteresting.

Yellow Potato Onion:

This picture was taken on a normal sized, 25cm, dinner plate.

The outstanding feature of this onion is the taste, probably the best of what I grew this year. It has a distinctive taste, that is better raw than cooked. It’s a real gourmet flavor, that’s nice when you want the flavor of onions to stand out in a dish.

I started 2 years ago with 1lb (500g) that I had shipped at some expense overseas. I didn’t weigh it, but after the first year I had roughly 2.5 times that. I replanted nearly all of it, and probably again have 2.5 times as much, or roughly 6 lbs (2.5 Kg). That’s kind of a lot of effort for not so many onions. The onions are also small compared with the other kinds I grew.

Another factor to consider, when thinking about yield, is you have to set aside part of your harvest to replant it unlike the topsetting onions where you can save the sets and eat the rest of the plant. That means you really only end up eating a little more than you planted in the first place. When you compare this ratio to other tuber plants like potatoes, that’s a pretty small ratio.

I mentioned above and in the previous post about the 2 year cycle of this plant, well something strange happened this year. Maybe the wet weather this year had something to do with it, but they mostly came out medium sized instead of either large or small! Most of them formed ‘nests’ too. There are also a few small and large ones. I don’t know what to expect when and if I replant them.

This was also the only onion I grew this year where I lost a few to rotting in the wet ground. I didn’t lose very many, maybe 4 onions in total. I’m afraid more may rot or go moldy in storage.

To be fair the reason they may not be doing so well in my garden is because of my climate, which is wet and ‘Pacific Northwest’ like. These onions may be better suited to warmer climates. It also may be a matter of growing them a few more years in my garden until they become more acclimated.

Belgian Shallot:

This is also the second year I’ve grown these. The first year they almost all died! One plant survived, giving me three shallots which I replanted. It appears this year many are rotting or molding after being harvested. The ground was very wet when I harvested them. The size of the roots for me was also very small.

It looks a lot like the Yellow Potato Onion, and in many ways the plants are very similar. I suspect the soil in my garden is just too heavy and wet for this type of onion.

Greeley Bunching Onion:

I must say, at the beginning I wasn’t very impressed with this one. Through a friend, via someone else, I got a small handful (maybe an ounce or 30g) of large-marble sized onions, together with the instructions that they should be spring planted and the fact that they are nesting type onions. I couldn’t easily get in touch with the original source to get more information. They must be a very rare onion, because there doesn’t seem to be any information about them anywhere on the Internet.

My first thoughts were they were kind of small, and while not a serious problem it was an inconvenience to have to spring plant them because I don’t do any other spring plantings of onions or garlic. Also, when you spring plant garlic it doesn’t usually do as well, so I thought a perennial onion that had to be spring planted probably wouldn’t turn into a very interesting plant.

Wow, I was surprised! This turned out to be my second favorite onion. They were amazingly prolific. The few grams of tiny onions turned into probably several kilos of the largest onions I grew this year. The resulting onions were as large as about 1.5″ (4 cm) in diameter, although some were smaller. Each small onion formed a ‘nest’ and turned into about 4 large onions. They look really attractive, and have tops that lend themselves to being tied together in bunches.

I assume since I started with very small onions that grew large, these must be the 2 year type, but I don’t know for sure. I will replant some of them and see if I end up with small onions next year.

Topsetting Onions

The white onions and topsets on the left are the Fleener Onion, and on the right the topsets are from the Amish onion and the root is either the Amish or Egyptian onion, I’m not sure anymore but they look pretty much the same.

This type of onion multiplies by forming topsets. This is the same thing hardneck garlic does when it forms scapes, but in the case of these onions you usually want to let the topsets fully mature so you can propagate the plants.

I grew 4 kinds of topsetting onions this year:

1. Egyptian Walking Onion
2. Amish Onion
3. Red and Brown Catawissa Onion
4. Fleener Onion

This kind of onion often had nice greens, although I didn’t find the greens of the Catawissa onion to be very special. I have read elsewhere on the Internet that you can eat the topsets of these onions, which are very spicy tasting. I didn’t eat any of these because I am trying to propagate them.

This kind of onion can be left in the ground where it will keep growing, or dug up to eat the root. First thing in the spring the greens will appear, at a time when onions are otherwise hard to come by, you can then eat the greens for a couple of months, around the equinox they will form topsets and the tops of the plants will die off for the year.

Egyptian Walking Onion:

This is a very nice onion. It’s strong growing as well as having nice tasting greens and roots. I have been growing it for 2 years now, and it has been establishing itself nicely in my garden. The oblong roots are not huge, but a reasonable size. Sometimes the roots will divide and form new plants this way.

One of the nice things about this onion is it is pretty common, and easy to find.

Amish Onion:

This was my favorite onion this year. My garden is located in the greater historic region of Friesland, which includes not only the present day Dutch province of that name but also the provinces to the west and east together with parts of modern day Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Russia. This historic region was the homeland of the Amish, and so is probably where this onion was first grown.

This onion must have known it was home! It really grew well and was very prolific. It looked really pretty when it was growing, with very distinctive looking greens. Each plant had two greens, one main shoot that went straight up, and a second one that curved out like the front of a harp.

The greens and roots were among the best tasting of all the varieties I grew, and the plants formed more topsets than any other.

Catawissa Onion:

These onion came in two colors, brown and ever-so-slightly reddish brown. Except for this very small difference in color, they were pretty much the same.

These were the smallest of the topsetting onions, both greens and roots. The roots were more cocktail onion sized, which I think is fine if it’s what you are expecting.

I suspect the climate of my garden is not the best for this onion. It came from a Seed Savers Exchange member who lives in Pennsylvania, and he probably has more humus in his ground than I do and less wind. I understand it grows very well in upstate New York.

This kind of onion is famous for forming topsets upon topsets in a very artistic way when growing. It did that a little bit in my garden, but not very much. Also the topsets that did form were smaller than what I was originally sent.

Fleener Onion:

This is another onion where my expectations were too high. It has a reputation of forming roots that are nearly the size of commercial onions, but didn’t come close to that in my garden. While most of the topsets it did form were large and healthy, I didn’t really get many more than what I started with. This was the only topsetting onion I grew that had white roots, and that was kind of nice.

I will certainly keep working on this onion, and see if I can acclimate it more to my garden.

Conclusions

I was really happy with many of these onions.

None of these onions had the common nastiness of supermarket onions, but I suspect that’s more because they are homegrown than anything else. I could have spent a long time describing the taste of each one, but I’m really not very good at that. I don’t envy the person who has to write descriptions for 50 different tomatoes in a seed catalog, all of which have to be unique and accurate. If I went to the trouble of explaining the differences, they may all be completely different in your garden anyway. I’m sure many of the tastes also change depending on the time of year you harvest them.

Mostly the taste was very good rich onion flavor without too much harshness.

The size of most older varieties of onions is much smaller than what you find in the supermarkets. If you want to grow large onions, you probably either have to grow modern hybrid varieties or develop your own varieties that are suited to your garden by growing the same plants for several years and roguing out the weaker/smaller ones.

Some of these onions are very similar, for example I would be hard pressed to go into much detail on the differences between the shallots and potato onions, they were very similar plants.

As far as what’s easy to grow, the topsetting onions are probably the easiest. In order to store the nesting onions, the roots need to be cured, that is hung up to dry for several weeks before storage. The topsetting onions can also be cured and stored, but they can just be left in the ground and dug up when you want to eat them, and the topsets themselves don’t require much in the way of curing. The topsetting onions are also easier and faster to propagate into more plants than the nesting onions, although the greeley onion also seems prolific.

I found all of the perennial onions to be easier to grow than normal onions. They didn’t need to be started indoors or transplanted. They are also more disease resistant than normal onions and garlic, and you can grow them on the same ground each year without rotating them if you want. At the same time, you want to keep in mind that while they may not themselves contract plant diseases they may be carriers, so you want to keep the ground you grow them on in mind when planning rotations of other allium plants.

Anthocyanin is a plant pigment which appears in fruit, vegetables, flowers, stems, leaves and sometimes roots. Or to be more precise, anthocyanins (plural) are plant pigments (plural). Recent research has identified over 500 different anthocyanins, with new ones being discovered all the time. The colour it produces may be red, purple or blue, depending on acidity. In fact, it’s so responsive to acidity it can be used as a pH indicator (red for acid, blue for alkaline) and is responsible for the pinks and blues shown by hydrangeas in different soil conditions.

Not all red/blue/purple colouring in plants is made by anthocyanin (beetroot is a notable exception), but the vast majority. Blackcurrants, cherries, blackberries, aubergines (eggplants), strawberries, red cabbage, poppies, violets, lavender all owe their colour to it. It puts the red into red wine and the blue into blueberries. It’s also responsible for red variants of some things that aren’t normally red, such as blood oranges and the leaves of copper beech trees. Red onions and purple podded peas and beans.

Why do plants produce anthocyanin?
It’s a sunblock. That’s its basic function. Have you ever noticed how the young stems and leaves of roses are red, and turn green as they grow? That’s anthocyanin serving to protect the delicate young plant parts until they’re mature enough to produce chlorophyll. Anthocyanin is actively produced by many autumn leaves too to protect them from excessive sun as the chlorophyll breaks down. Last year I grew some Red Duke of York (bright red skinned) potatoes and noticed they didn’t go green and spoil when exposed to the sun as most potatoes do. Anthocyanin again.









Another purpose of anthocyanin is to give bright and beautiful colour. Nature seems to delight in creating colour for its own sake. And there is an advantage to the plant in having its fruit nicely coloured, to attract creatures like birds to find and eat it, in the hopes they might poo out the seeds somewhere useful. Birds don’t actually see colour the way we do, but they can see the contrast between a red/purple fruit and the green foliage around it. The same principle applies to attracting pollinators to flowers. Bees see ultraviolet, which make red flowers stand out intensely, even though they can’t see the colour red as we know it.

And the third purpose of anthocyanin is antioxidant. As well as protecting plants from excessive sun they counteract harmful radicals caused by UV light. And that’s where the greatest usefulness to humans comes in, because these antioxidant properties are still effective even after the plant has been eaten. When you eat a red fruit or a purple vegetable you’re getting all that beneficial antioxidant potential for yourself. There’s been some recent research which suggests that anthocyanin actively kills off cancer cells in humans without harming normal cells (see below).

The name anthocyanin comes from the Greek for “blue flower”. It’s made by a fairly complicated biochemical process involving five different enzymes. Consequently it doesn’t take much for environmental or genetic factors to disrupt production of it. For example, most peas can’t produce anthocyanin at all … only the presence of a specific gene acts as a ’switch’ for anthocyanin production and enables biosynthesis to happen. Varieties which have this gene are easily identified by their purple pods, pink flowers, purple-speckled seeds and magenta splodge in the leaf axil, or any combination of those.

Research on the anti-cancer properties found that it’s most effective when lots of different anthocyanins are consumed simultaneously (as opposed to large amounts of one type). Black raspberries are the berry of choice as they naturally contain multiple anthocyanins, but it’s probably just as effective to eat lots of different red blue and purple fruits and vegetables.

For more about the ongoing research on anthocyanin, see this article from The Guardian, 20 August 2007:
Forget Eating Your Greens … Red and Blue Foods Are The Cancer Fighters