Green Onion Seeds

Green onions are the fresh, fast kitchen favourite — slender white stems topped with bright green hollow leaves and a clean, mild oniony flavour that is gentler than a fully matured bulb. Harvested young, they bring crisp texture and a fresh aroma rather than the sharp bite of stored onions, which makes them the go-to garnish snipped over salads, omelettes, soups, and classic Egyptian dishes like ful and koshari. Both the white base and the green tops are eaten, so nothing goes to waste, and because they belong to the short-day onion family suited to Egypt's latitude, they settle happily into a sunny home bed or balcony container.

Planting

Onion is a cool-season crop, so in Egypt the practical route is nursery sowing in autumn — sow in a nursery from mid-September to mid-October, then transplant the pencil-thick seedlings around mid-November, roughly 30-35 days after sowing (up to 6-8 weeks in some systems). Because Egypt sits at a low latitude, choose short-day types (Giza varieties and similar) that bulb at only about 11-12 hours of daylight; long-day temperate onions would only make leaves here. Sow seed about 0.6-1.3 cm deep when seeding outdoors, or around 1.9 cm deep when starting indoors. The best soil temperature for germination is 15-25 C, and seedlings usually emerge in about 2-3 weeks (15-25 days depending on soil warmth). Set transplants about 5 cm deep, spaced 7.6-10 cm apart in rows 20-46 cm apart; closer spacing keeps stems slender, while wider spacing builds larger bulbs. Give the plants full sun for the strongest growth.

Fertilizing

Aim for soil that is rich in organic matter with a pH between 6.0 and 7.0. Work fertilizer into the top 15 cm or so, applying phosphorus and potassium ahead of planting based on a soil test. As the plants grow through the cool winter, side-dress with nitrogen during the vegetative period — for example a measured nitrogen feed around mid-season and again later, or urea applied once or twice across the season. Stop the nitrogen once bulbing begins in late winter, since excess nitrogen delays bulb maturity and can leave you with soft bulbs.

Care

Keep the soil consistently moist near field capacity, giving roughly 2.5 cm of water per week and wetting down to about 30 cm; over the whole season onions need about 350-550 mm of water. They are most sensitive to dryness at transplanting and during bulb enlargement (around 60 days after transplanting), so do not let them go thirsty then. Onions are sensitive to soil salinity, a real concern in parts of the Delta, so use good-quality irrigation water and well-drained beds. Thin direct-seeded plants to 7.6-10 cm apart before they crowd or begin to bulb. Watch for onion thrips and onion maggot (onion fly), and for diseases such as neck rot, basal/Fusarium rot, pink root, downy mildew, purple blotch, and white rot; avoiding excess nitrogen and rotating crops both help keep disease down. If you let some plants mature into bulbs, stop watering once they are full size and the tops begin to fall, and harvest when about half the tops have toppled and dried, the necks have softened, and papery skins have formed — in Egypt that runs from roughly March to May.