Uploaded March 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
In 2018 we discovered a really useful open pollinated yellow onion variety called Dakota Tears. After our initial onion seeding turned out to be a terrible disappointment, we purchased seed of Dakota Tears from High Mowing Seed in a late order with some other things we needed, almost as an afterthought. This meant the onions weren't seeded into trays in the greenhouse until April, almost 2 months later than the standard onion seeding time for this area. From the very beginning these onions were impressive, as they germinated quickly and thickly and rapidly grew to very strong vigorous seedlings. We were able to plant them out at a fairly normal time and they produced a beautiful crop of onions. They were so impressive that we decided to try saving the seed from this variety as it was open pollinated. With hybrid onions, the plants have cytoplasmic male sterility and will be unable to produce pollen, making seed saving impossible unless you cross them with a pollen fertile variety.
In terms of storage, Dakota Tears performed very well, only two onions in the overwintered onion string of 36 onions sprouted before we were ready to plant them for the seed crop. Many of the onions were starting to push rootlets through the skin at the base though. In future years I would like to store more onions for seed to be able to select for the least root and shoot sprouting to improve the storage capabilities of this variety even more.
One area which may be a problem in seed saving with onions is our population size. This year we only planted 32 onions from 36 total onions stored for seed originally. The recommended minimum population size for saving onions seed according to John Navazio in his book "The Organic Seed Grower" is 120. Saving and planting 120 onions for seed seems incredibly impractical at our scale. We don't particularly want to go into the seed selling business, and we don't have a need for producing such a huge quantity of seed that would result from so many onions being saved. Even the 32 onions we are growing out in this year will produce far more seed than we can use. We will have to see if the small population size becomes a problem in future years.
In 2018 we discovered a really useful open pollinated yellow onion variety called Dakota Tears. After our initial onion seeding turned out to be a terrible disappointment, we purchased seed of Dakota Tears from High Mowing Seed in a late order with some other things we needed, almost as an afterthought. This meant the onions weren't seeded into trays in the greenhouse until April, almost 2 months later than the standard onion seeding time for this area. From the very beginning these onions were impressive, as they germinated quickly and thickly and rapidly grew to very strong vigorous seedlings. We were able to plant them out at a fairly normal time and they produced a beautiful crop of onions. They were so impressive that we decided to try saving the seed from this variety as it was open pollinated. With hybrid onions, the plants have cytoplasmic male sterility and will be unable to produce pollen, making seed saving impossible unless you cross them with a pollen fertile variety.
In terms of storage, Dakota Tears performed very well, only two onions in the overwintered onion string of 36 onions sprouted before we were ready to plant them for the seed crop. Many of the onions were starting to push rootlets through the skin at the base though. In future years I would like to store more onions for seed to be able to select for the least root and shoot sprouting to improve the storage capabilities of this variety even more.
One area which may be a problem in seed saving with onions is our population size. This year we only planted 32 onions from 36 total onions stored for seed originally. The recommended minimum population size for saving onions seed according to John Navazio in his book "The Organic Seed Grower" is 120. Saving and planting 120 onions for seed seems incredibly impractical at our scale. We don't particularly want to go into the seed selling business, and we don't have a need for producing such a huge quantity of seed that would result from so many onions being saved. Even the 32 onions we are growing out in this year will produce far more seed than we can use. We will have to see if the small population size becomes a problem in future years.
