How to Grow Green Onions (Scallions): The Fastest, Easiest Onion

GardenDraft Team · August 17, 2026 · Updated August 1, 2026 · 8 min read

Part of: Garden Planning Guides · How to Grow Vegetables — Crop Guides A–Z

Green onions — also called scallions — are the fastest, easiest member of the onion family and a perfect crop for impatient gardeners and small spaces. There's no bulb to size up and no curing to fuss over: you grow them for the slender white-and-green stalks and pull them young. They're ready in weeks, fit anywhere, tolerate cold, and you can even regrow them from kitchen scraps.

Two easy ways to grow green onions

The simplest route is to grow true bunching onions (also sold as scallions), which never form a bulb and are bred exactly for this. Direct-sow the seed thickly in a band about a quarter to half an inch deep in full sun to part shade, and don't bother thinning much, since crowding keeps them slim, which is what you want. The other route: plant onion sets or even ordinary storage-onion seed close together and harvest them young as scallions before they bulb. Both work; bunching onions just hold longer in the ground without changing.

If you go the bunching route, the catalog page shows the range: quick slender types ready in about 60 to 75 days from seed (faster still if you pull them small), plus hardy Japanese types bred to overwinter, and red-shanked varieties for color. A few heirloom types will even divide at the base year after year, turning a single sowing into a semi-permanent clump — the same habit that makes their cousins, chives, such a fixture.

Timing: start early, keep going late

Bunching onions are cold-tough — hardy to roughly the low 20s°F — so they go in early. The catalog window for direct sowing is two to four weeks before your last frost, as soon as the surface soil crumbles (what "last frost" really means). For an even earlier pull, start seed indoors six to eight weeks ahead and set out little pencil-lead seedlings in clumps of three or four; they need only a brief hardening-off. At the other end of the year, a late-summer sowing gives a fall crop, and in mild-winter regions that same sowing overwinters for the first green thing you eat in spring. A row cover or cold frame stretches them deeper into winter almost anywhere.

That overwintering trick deserves a little more detail, because it's the best free lunch in the allium family. Sow a hardy bunching type in late summer, let it reach pencil-lead size before cold shuts growth down, and tuck a light mulch around the band once the ground firms up. The seedlings sit tight all winter, then wake with the first thaw and bulk up weeks before anything spring-sown can catch them — you're pulling fat scallions while your neighbors are still sowing. In cold-winter zones, the same sowing under a low hoop tunnel usually sails through; where winters are mild, skip the protection entirely and pull all winter long.

Soil, spacing, and feeding

Scallions are shallow-rooted and appreciate the same conditions as their bulbing relatives: loose, compost-fed soil that drains well and never crusts hard. There's little spacing math to do — sow a band and let them jostle — but for tidy singles the square-foot value is 3 inches, sixteen per square (how square-foot spacing works). Weeds are the real enemy of such slim, grass-like seedlings, so hand-weed early and often; a fine mulch between bands helps once they're up. Feeding is light-touch: compost at sowing plus one gentle nitrogen boost mid-crop is plenty. For a longer white shank, hill a little soil against the stems as they grow — the same blanching trick used on leeks, in miniature.

Regrow from scraps

Green onions are the classic windowsill regrow trick, and it genuinely works. Save the white root ends after cooking, with about an inch of stalk and the roots attached, and set them in a glass of water or poke them into a pot of soil. Fresh green tops regrow within days, and you can harvest the same roots two or three times before they tire out. It's a free, continuous supply and a great way to get kids gardening. Soil-planted scraps outperform the water glass over time — the glass version thins with each regrowth, while potted roots keep drawing real nutrition and can carry on for months.

Quick, cool, and forgiving

Scallions are a cool-season crop at heart, growing best in spring and fall, though they're far more heat-tolerant than head-forming onions and soldier on through summer. They're hardy to frost and can overwinter in mild climates for an extra-early spring pull. Keep the soil evenly moist for tender, mild stalks — a little steady water is about all the maintenance they need. Because they mature so fast and take so little room, they're ideal for tucking into gaps between slower crops.

The short trouble list

Green onions inherit the allium family's few problems in mild form. Onion maggots occasionally tunnel seedlings in cold, wet springs — a row cover at sowing blocks the fly, and rotating alliums to a fresh bed each year (rotation basics) keeps pressure low. Thrips rasp silvery streaks into leaves in hot, dry spells; a hard spray of water and even moisture usually holds them. Damping off can thin a too-wet indoor sowing (prevention here). That's about the whole list — no caterpillars, no beetles, and deer and rabbits leave alliums alone, which is why scallions make such a good protective edging in companion planting. Pairing them near carrots has real support: their sulfur scent is documented to mask the host-finding cues of carrot rust fly.

Harvest young, and stagger sowings

Pull green onions whenever they're pencil-thick and the tops are 6 inches or more — younger is milder. For a steady kitchen supply rather than a glut, sow a fresh short band every two weeks using succession planting — the catalog's default interval is 14 days — since a single sowing all matures together. Loosen with a hand fork before pulling if your soil is heavy, or you'll snap the stalks and leave the best part behind. They keep a week or two in the refrigerator standing in a jar with an inch of water, but the better storage is the bed itself: bunching onions hold at harvestable size far longer than lettuce or radishes hold at theirs.

Scallions in containers

Few crops suit a pot better. Any container 6 inches deep or more works — window boxes are ideal — filled with ordinary potting mix, sown in a thick band, and kept evenly moist (container gardening basics). A pot by the kitchen door plus a scrap jar on the windowsill can keep a household in green onions nearly year-round — and when frost threatens, the pot simply moves to a bright indoor sill and keeps producing while the garden sleeps. Find your sowing windows on the planting calendar.