Tom Carey: Onions for all

To be honest, onions have never been a favorite of mine. My least preferred pizza topping is big chunks of them. I can tolerate deep fried onion rings only if there is more deep and fried than onion. My wife is even welcome to cherry-pick my restaurant salads for easily nabbed pieces.

I respect onions, just as I respect classical music. But no other person can lecture me that in my heart of hearts, I actually like classical music. Just because I have a college degree (B.A. from Rollins College, Class of ‘79) does not mean I should or do like any number of classics. And as a farmer, I do not have to savor the taste of every crop I could possibly grow.

This is not to say I do not consume onions. Diced, sautéed, simmered, breaded, combined, and sauced are all acceptable ways to cook the presumptive dominance of onions into most recipes. Every one of my soup concoctions will be hiding some onion. Pasta night at my homestead usually involves doctoring up the bottled tomato sauce with some form of finely diced martyrs from the garden. My recommended formula for a ‘mess-o-greens’ starts with onions in the cast iron skillet.

Scallion (Allium fistulosum) or green onions can always be found growing in my garden. And I mean always, even in our Florida summer. After the Christmas freeze of 1989, my only crop harvestable for sale at the Winter Park Farmers Market was scallions. Their mild flavor agrees with my persnickety tastes, and of course scallion’s nutritive value cannot be debated. Using hands-on intensive methods in our gardens, we can grow four times the edible weight of scallions than a farmer can raising field grown commodity bulb onions.

The variety of scallion from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, named Guardsman, has given me an astounding success rate. I liberally broadcast the seeds on the surface of a container of potting soil and cover them with a quarter inch of more soil. Sprouts appear in five days and can be left to grow almost indefinitely (trimming the tops will provide a first taste). To plant the seedlings into the earth, pull a furrow into the garden soil, add some compost, separate the mass of sprouts, prune off all but an inch of roots, and gingerly set the small scallions into the ground 2 inches apart, up to 1 inch deep. Harvest can begin in just a few weeks. You can trim some tops with scissors or loosen the soil to pull the whole scallion. As with most alliums, be sure to share with everyone you plan to kiss.