Onion butts are pictured.

Celery butts, carrot butts, lettuce butts, bok choy butts, choy sum butts, napa cabbage butts, lettuce butts, cabbage butts, but nothing beats a big juicy onion butt.

Its fun to set butts in a small amount of water and watch it grow new foliage. This is great for young kids or new experiments.

But onion butts (pun intended) are serious stuff.

Whether the onion came from the store or my garden I save the last ½ inch to ¼ inch of the onion including the root and basal plate. The basal plate is the area, the “plate”, the roots grow from. When I’m through cooking and cleaning up my kitchen I take my new butt to the garden or flower bed and put it butt side down, lightly cover with soil.

Keep it moist and it will put out nice pretty green onion tops. These are not chives, please do not call them chives. They will continue to grow and after a month or so you can pull it up and 3 or 4 onions will have formed surrounded by the old original onion that is starting to decline.

Remove the older soggy onion and you’ll have 3 or 4 fresh little green onions to separate and replant or clean up and eat.

I like to replant them. I have a never-ending onion garden due to this. I run low sometimes but I never run out.

Something to remember is that onions are feeders. They like to be fertilized. Onions like to be watered regularly.

Once a week is usually enough year round but almost no watering during winter which is the wet season in our zone.

The Smith County Master Gardener program is a volunteer organization in connection with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

Marinda Nguyen

Smith County Master Gardener