Last summer I saw a lovely purple flower in Reta Zane’s garden. The flowers were globe-shaped and about five or six inches across. I knew it was some sort of onion, but I didn’t know which one. There are many ornamental onions that you can plant as bulbs in the fall, just like tulips and daffodils. When they’re planted for their flowers, they’re usually called alliums, the scientific name for the onion genus. Some, like Allium ‘Globemaster,’ are three feet tall with huge eight inch purple blooms. The bulbs are sort of pricey. When I saw the huge number of these beautiful purple alliums blooming here and there in her herb garden and rose garden, and some in the perennial border, I had to ask her what variety they were. She said, “Oh those are leeks. I planted them years ago and when I saw how pretty the flowers were I decided to let some go to seed every year.” They reseed in her garden with abandon.
Leeks are expensive in the store–often $3.00 a pound or more–and yet Reta was growing them with no effort at all. All she had to do was let a few of them go to seed, and every year she had more than the year before. Each leek produces hundreds of seed, so you can have your leeks and eat them, too.
Too many of our customers are afraid of seed, and I hope that this year I can convince more of you to experiment with growing plants from seed. Annuals are easy, so are some perennials. Most plants want to germinate, it’s their means of survival, after all. Here’s a picture of leeks germinating in a flat in the greenhouse.
