After the great advice on the WallaWalla thread, I thought i would ask if anyone has a method for growing small onions for pickling. Not silverskins :( but ordinary brown ones.
I tend to pickle my shallots rather than onions.
Suttons used to sell seeds for a brown pickling onion called SY 300 though it doesn't appear on their website now. Kings Seeds suggest Giant Zittau for pickling.
I would grow them in wide tubs, laying single seeds on the surface of the compost quite close together then scattering compost on top. I have grown single shallots from seed this way and it has worked well. This year I grew Unwins Ambition and that gave rock hard golf ball sized onions. Will be trying Prisma and Camelot from the evil empire next, would they be any good to you?
http://search.thompson-morgan.com/search?w=shallot+seeds
You could have a go with any old onion seed but I suspect it works best with onions which are naturally quite small.
Or if you have good weed free ground, sow a row and dont thin them. But if you have a few tubs going spare or can slice an old blue Barrel up, I recommend the tub method - you can grow a good number and you don't get any diseases. Onion rot and onion fly have hit my main crop onions something rotten this year but the tub crop has been unaffected.
Thanks ellen, i will give that method a go and the giant Z's. Tee Gee we do pickle some of our shallots but there's never enough ( + they are SO nice to use in other ways).
allotment.org.uk suggests close spaced Ailsa Craig gives a good onion for pickling - come to think of it, a neighbour who forgot to plant his out after sowing them in trays ended up with a load of small onions.
I just plant late onion sets out when the shops are selling them off. just get big enough so that you can pickle them. lovely ummm...
I'm a big fan of proper pickled onions so grow a fair few for that reason.... I find the SY300 and Giant Zittau are pretty reliable, personally prefer SY300.
Keep a look out for the italian Cipollini type coin onions, they're very good pickled, as are Prisma Shallots (very dense even for a shallot so stay crunchy) and I find the smaller members of my Long Red FLorence make an interesting pickle, but being a bit softer don't keep quite so well... use them first adn the shallots last....
Must say that's an interesting technique from Willsy, I'll bear it in mind next year....
Also try growing five or six seeds in a module (of almost any type of maincrop onion) and planting them out as a clump....
Plant your sets close, about 2"x 2" late in the season so they dont develop and stop watering when they get to the size you want...