Kitchen Garden Forum

Gardening Which has just published the results of their trials of shallot sets. Generally they got better results with the Spring sown ones with much heavier crops and less trouble with bolting.
For the Autumn planted ones, the best results were from Jermor.

For Spring sown the best were Golden Gourmet, Longor, Micor, Red Sun and Topper.

For seed sown, the best was Banana, followed by Ambition and Prisma.

Thank you for sharing that info.

That's interesting. I generally plant mine in early spring but last year tried some in autumn, to be lifted in summer as usual. Most of them bolted but I put that down to the funny weather we've had this year. Perhaps they were just unhappy with being planted in the autumn.

I plant mine in January or February depending whether the ground is frozen or not and I've had success with Topper for the past 15 years. I've also grown Longor and Jermor, with good results but they don't keep as well as Topper.

I've stopped trying to over-winter shallots, onions or garlic as there are too many losses here and in any case, the spring planted garlic lasts all winter, and the Topper shallots last easily until the following summer so you don't need an autumn planting.

If you leave a few garlic bulbs in they keep on dividing and you can pick a few small fresh bulbs at any time of the year.

Down here in Brizzle, our garlic always does fine overwintered and in fact I can't remember the last time I tried a Spring sowing.

It's good to see the results for each of these shallots. I only grow the "long" type - generally Banana, Longor or Jeremor. For the last couple of years we've been sowing Longor in the Spring and they have done well enough to give us a crop and provide seed for the following year. Only a small patch mind.