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If you live by yourself, or simply don't use much of green and white onions, you probably have the same problem that I do: you buy a sack of white onions and a some fresh green onion blades. After a couple of days, your green onions start to rot and half-way through the sack of white onions, they rot too.

Aside from disgusting smell of rotting onions, paying full price for something half of which you'll throw away just doesn't feel right...

In this short write-up, I will show you how to solve both of these problems. And the first step is to stop buying green onions.

Bottom of white onion with dried roots

If you look at the bottom of white onion head, you will notice that there are dried up roots there. With the help of water, new, functional roots will grow again.

We will use the excess white onions that usually rot to grow fresh green onion. In fact, even if you don't have anything going to waste, using the method I am about to demostrate can provide you with freshest green onion you can ever get.

During the growth process, you can cut the green blades once, and use the white onion; however, since the blades seem to grow in "steps", i.e. when long blades are available for harvest you can see new ones just starting to grow, I usually leave white onion in the "planter" until it rots to nothing... With that said, let's move onto the production of the planter for our onions.

Regular 2L plastic bottle

I will show you how to make a simple onion planter from a 2L plastic bottle. However, if you're one of those people who are addicted to "bottled water", you sure will have plenty of those 500ml bottles laying around. Those you can actually just chop off the top and use the bottom as the planter, skipping the rest of the steps.

Take the 2L bottle and cut the top part off, additionally, I'd recommend cutting the neck off as well, as it would promote easier root growth.

The picture below shows how I cut my bottle:

Throw the neck of the bottle away and insert the top part of the bottle into the bottom but reverse it first; the idea is that the top part will get "stuck" at the top, and the onion will sit on the part where the neck of the bottle used to be:

Fill the bottle with water to about half an inch above the part with roots on the onion. Too much water will cause the onion to rot too fast, and not enough will make it evaporate below the roots and cause the onion to dry up again.

The only thing our onions now need is light and additional water when the current one evaporates.

You don't actually need any light until the green blades start poking through, and if you starve those of light, they will turn out yellow and not as tasty as their green brothers.

In general, you'd want to make about 4 or 6 of these planters because it takes time for the green onion blades to grow. When just starting, "plant" an additional onion every other day; and when they eventually start to rot and stop producing greens, replace them in the same fashion. This way, you'll have continuous supply of green onions and not just end up with a load of it one day and have all rotten up few days later.

Enjoy!

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