Time to sow: Spring Onions!
Grow your own spring onions for a quick and easy way to freshen up your home cooking, with tips from our friends at BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Packed with flavour, we’ve got the perfect recipe to use them in, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022.
This spring, make plans for your plot with spring onions. Perfect for salads, stir fries and much more, spring onions are an easy to grow, delicious crop to get growing, that take up a small space.
Read below for garden know-how from BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. What’s more, find out more about a tasty casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe, using your spring onions, from the BBC Good Food Show Summer in 2022.
Sowing peas
Sow your seeds straight into the ground in place that gets lots of sun and rich, well-drained soil. Clear any weeds, add a good fertiliser in advance. Before sowing, rake the soil to a fine texture.
Seeds can be sown in drills 20mm deep and 10cm apart.
You can also sow the seeds in trays and wait for seedlings to develop before planting out into the garden.
When the seedlings begin to show, thin them out up to 5cm apart. Make sure they’re well-watered and don’t let the soil dry out.
For harvests of spring onions through the year, sow a batch of seeds every few weeks from spring to autumn.
Harvesting and storage
You should be ready to harvest your spring onions eight weeks after sowing. Before pulling up the bulbs, fork the soil around the plants to ease up the soil.
Once picked, eat your spring onions soon after being harvested for the best flavour.
Casarecce pasta with tomato sauce recipe
This recipe is from the BBC Good Food Show Summer 2022, as seen on the Italian Kitchen from Adam Bush, with a recipe from Olive Magazine. This recipe is vegan, and only takes 15 minutes to make.
Serves 2
Ingredients
- 250g cherry tomatoes, halved
- 3 spring onions, finely chopped
- 4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 4-5 dashes hot sauce
- 200g casarecce
- a few basil leaves, torn
Method
Mix together the cherry tomatoes, spring onions, olive oil, vinegar and hot sauce in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.
Bring to the boil a large pan of salted water. Once boiling, add the casarecce and cook until al dente. Add 1-2 tbsp of the cooking water to your bowl of mixed ingredients before draining the pasta.
Drain the pasta and toss in with the sauce. Sprinkle over the torn basil and serve.