If you're like me, you've probably seen this familiar sight in your pantry,
an onion that's gone bad. Well, it hasn't gone bad.
In fact it's actually trying to live again.
And so in this video we're going to learn how to plant from a sprouting onion in
a way you've probably never seen before.
Kevin's Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a
greener thumb.
And part of that is making use of your food scraps but in a way that actually
sets you up for success.
Cause a lot of the things that go around on the internet about regrowing food
scraps, your carrot tops, all that stuff,
it's not quite there as far as what you're actually going to get.
And I think for beginner gardeners it doesn't set their expectations right.
Cause let's say they say, hey, you can replant a carrot top.
Well you're just going to get carrot greens,
you're not going to get a new carrot. And so with onions,
I think there's a cooler, more creative and interesting way to replant these,
which is exactly what we're going to do.
So cultivate that Like button for epic onion sprouts.
And let's get into the video.
The first thing we're going to do is diagnose this sick and troubled onion here.
So we have some of the green tips here that have kind of rotted out and are a
little mushy.
We'll cut these off cause we don't want to introduce that type of rot,
right? And it's sort of rotting away. We'll cut these off.
The next thing we want to look at to understand the onion is how many shoots are
coming out. Just from my initial inspection,
it sure looks like we've got one and two.
So we have two in here. Now what do we need to do? What do we have to remember?
The onions evolve, right? So you have your root down here,
you have the actual bulb right here, and then there's sprouts coming out here.
So what we're going to do is I'm going to peel away the papery bits,
see if we can go journey to the center of the onion and what are we going to
find? Now you're going to notice first of all,
there's a pungent smell because it gets sweeter and a little bit more sour,
I guess you could say. It's very pungent when it starts to rot away. And this,
this onion tissue right here, it's just really a little little rugged.
It's just not good. You can tell it's already starting to rot.
So we're going to break it away, break it away, break it away.
And you know what's interesting is look at this, look right here.
What do you see here? What do you see here that you shouldn't see?
We're already seeing some root tissue right there.
What is happening? Intriguing, right? So let's keep going.
So you might be thinking you're destroying the onion and that's actually not
true. And we'll see why in a moment. And here's another interesting,
look what I just found.
Some more roots right there and another root right there.
And that's why I'm going layer by layer very carefully because I want to see
what's going on underneath the surface here. Look at this.
There's that root tissue. Probably not going to save this one cause it's very,
very long. But look at that. Pretty interesting, right?
Okay, let's keep on going.
So I'm taking off all these outer layers that we don't need and that don't serve
the new growth really.
And what we're trying to do is we're trying to uncover where it gets nice and
firm again. Oh look, we found where this one grew upside down,
it didn't quite make it all the way out when it sprouted.
And so it got stuck under and it was starting to grow in.
A lot of new discoveries we are making in this humble little onion, huh?
Take a look. Remember we have two sprouts, right?
And so it's been divided really into two here.
So what I'm going to do is see if I can just gently separate these after I peel
back a couple more layers.
Okay. So we have these two pieces here.
We have the old root tissue at the bottom,
but you can see where the new roots are coming out.
It's not quite at the bottom. See what I mean?
You have this old dead root tissue down here and then there's another little gap
if you will, and it's reset.
And so you don't actually need the root tissue at the bottom.
And you can split this in half, which is what I'm going to do here.
So I'm coming through with my knife and very gently just to make sure I don't
cut anything that I don't want to cut. There we go. So we're going to chop that
right down the middle. Check that out.
So when you look at it, what you see here,
this is the root tissue zone of the onion.
And so this is where the old onion was, but if I peel away,
let me just peel this away so you can actually see what's happening here.
You can see the new roots are not coming out at the bottom.
They're coming out above the bottom.
And so you don't actually need this right here.
You could chop right about there
off, and take a look. It's kind of dead. There's no,
there's no water in that tissue right there. We don't need it.
And what we've given ourselves is, well,
it looks like we recovered about three roots on this one. So not the best,
but really not the worst. And we're going to put this in water to root the rest.
Let's do this one now. This one has no roots yet. We can cut off,
well no, there's one right there, but we can cut off this section right here.
Doesn't seem to be necessary. It's old root tissue.
And voila! Before I go onto the next step, I'm just going to clean up.
If I've damaged any of these layers, I want intact layers only.
So I'll peel off this extra outer layer.
But we're at a point where this can regrow really well.
I'm removing this right here because it's a little wrinkly and I feel like it's
probably gonna contribute to rot more than would contribute to growth.
So we'll remove this, this final outer layer on the second one here too.
So see how we have a nice more firm layer here.
That's exactly what we're looking for. So from this big honking onion,
and this is actually a really big one,
it's another one that I have downstairs that's just starting to sprout.
Look what was inside. Now the question becomes, what do you do now.
We've uncovered the hidden gems.
What do we actually do to regrow these for real out in the garden?
Now remember we have every piece of the plant.
We have root zone which has the totipotency,
the ability to produce roots.
But we don't have quite enough roots yet and so what we'll do is we're going to
soak this for about five, six,
seven days and what you want to see is you want to see maybe an inch,
inch and a half of really solid root growth coming out.
Now when you have that, you can go ahead and plant it.
You can plant it directly in your garden or you can plant it in a small
container, a balcony planter. Whatever your space is,
just adapt to that. Now when I grow onions normally in my garden,
I grow them from what are known as sets. Sometimes I grow from seed,
but most of the time I grow from sets. Sets are small little bulbs,
just basically a baby version of this that you would plant maybe an inch,
two inches deep and it's relatively shallow.
And then it seems like they bulb up really nicely if you plant them like that.
Now with these, because these are not quite as set,
I'm going to plant them a little bit deeper. I'm probably,
once this has the roots,
I'll probably plant it somewhere around there because this was not intended
really to be exposed to the sun.
It was was growing from inside this onion and I think it might get exposed to a
little bit of sunburn if I do that. So what I'll do is I'll go here.
Now what are you going to get? Are you going to get a big honking bulb?
Probably not. It's going to be a little more oval in shape, I would guess. Uh,
and it may have a tendency to throw a flower up sooner than the average onion
would, but it's still a really fun thing to do.
And I really encourage you guys from something as simple as this that you just
forgot about in a grocery store,
you can actually learn quite a bit about plants and have a really fulfilling
gardening experience. Even if you think you can't grow anything at all.
Remember, we don't grow plants. They grow themselves.
We're there to steward and shepherd them in their journey, right?
So if you like the video, throw this to a friend, say, hey, try this out.
Throw a Like. Throw a subscribe. Or if you want to support,
you can always pick up my book. It's called Field Guide to Urban Gardening,
and it's really about how to grow plants no matter where you live.
Giving you the gardener's brain.
Think like a gardener so you don't have to Google stuff all the time and you
just kind of can figure the answers out for yourself, alright? Till next time,
good luck in the garden. Keep growing these onions.
I'll see you on the next one.