{"id":22601,"date":"2019-06-21T20:01:58","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T18:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=22601"},"modified":"2025-11-01T13:46:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:46:03","slug":"22601","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=22601","title":{"rendered":"Johannes’ Shallot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was St. John\u2019s Day and many Norwegians (and other Scandinavians) celebrated the evening before what is known here as Sankthans<\/em> or Jonsok<\/em> with communal bonfires, the big midsummer celebration on the eve of St. John’s Day! Sankt Hans is a short form of Sankt Johannes (and my grandson is Johannes, so this is for him <3)<\/p>\n

There is a special perennial onion which was traditionally harvested on this day in the Netherlands, which I believe to have a much large potential than its current status as a local food crop, as it is so much easier to grow, in particular in areas increasingly suffering from summer droughts and water shortages, along with many other perennial vegetables. If nothing else, it complements shallots and onions in that it is available much earlier in the year!<\/p>\n

On a visit to the Utrecht Botanical Gardens in the Netherlands some years ago, I\u2019d photographed an onion called Sint-Jansui and given the botanical name Allium fistulosum var. proliferum.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Botanist Gerard van Buiten at Utrecht later wrote to me \u201cAh, I see you have found our \u201cSt Jansuien! Yes, it is an old local variety, grown around Utrecht. One of our gardeners used to grow it on his nursery a long time ago. Every year on \u201cSt. Jansdag\u201d, a box of onions was delivered at Paleis Soestdijk, where Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard used to live. It is grown nowadays in some urban garden projects in the city\u201d. <\/em><\/p>\n

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The only time Allium x cornutum flowered in my garden<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It turns out that this onion is not related to Allium fistulosum<\/em> and is classified as a triploid hybrid onion Allium x cornutum <\/em>which has been found both in Europe (Netherlands, France and Croatia) as well as India from where, it is speculated it may have originated. Like Egyptian onion \/ walking onion (Allium x proliferum<\/em>), it is sterile and produces bulbils in its inflorescence. I\u2019ve only experienced flowering of this once in 10 years of growing A x cornutum <\/em>(see below). 10 years ago, Dr. Reinhard Fritsch had sent me 3 accessions from the German gene bank IPK Gatersleben, but only one of these has proven hardy here, although the French accession survived a few years. The other was from India and died the first winter.<\/p>\n

In 2014, an open access paper appeared in the BMC Plant Biology journal (see https:\/\/bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com\/articles\/10.1186\/1471-2229-14-24<\/a>).\u00a0 This study combined molecular, phylogenetic and cytogenetic data and provided evidence for a unique triparental origin A.<\/em>\u00a0\u00d7\u00a0cornutum<\/em>\u00a0with three putative parental species,\u00a0A. cepa<\/em>,\u00a0A. pskemense<\/em>, and\u00a0A. roylei. <\/em>Hardiness <\/em>is probably bestowed by Allium pskemense which has been growing in the Ringve Botanical Gardens in Trondheim for many years.<\/p>\n

I had planted the Croatian accession in the new Allium garden at the botanical gardens in Trondheim a couple of years ago and I started harvesting it the other day as it starts to die back at this time of year and looks untidy:<\/p>\n

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Allium x cornutum in the Allium garden at the Ringve Botanical Gardens in Trondheim.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In this little patch, there were an enormous amount of onions, admittedly a bit on the small size, but relatively easy to peel and far outyielding shallots here! I will now harvest these and replant to see how well these yield after one year of growth (I am unsure as to exactly when these were planted, but this may be two years of growth).<\/p>\n