Everlasting Green Onion

My sister e-mailed in a Pinstrosity that she just couldn't get to work...The Everlasting Green Onion pin that took the web by storm.

The Original Pin

http://homemadeserenity.blogspot.com/2011/03/putting-food-by-beef-onions-and-vanilla.html 

Just put the white ends in a jar of water, put it in the sun, and in a few days time you'll see growth!

Well, this didn't quite work out for my little sister. She said, "a couple weeks ago I got a bunch of green onions. I decided to try out this tip for having almost continual green onions. I saved the white end, put them in a glass of water, and put them on the windowsill. After a week and a half there was no new growth, and my kitchen smelled like strong onions starting to go bad, so I dumped out the failure of this pin. I don't know if I cut too close to the roots for it to grow again, or if I needed to change out the water, or if it was too cold out side so the cup was exposed to too cool temperatures, or what. If it has worked for anyone else let me know what to do!"

Now I had great success with this, and I didn't even have a sunny window to put the onion ends in. I saw growth on the 2nd day. So when she and I got together over this past weekend for family photos we talked about this to try and figure out what went wrong. Luckily it just took one question..."How much of the white end did you leave?" In our family we use just about the entire green onion, and so she had cut down pretty close to the root and then put that little end in the water. That there was the problem. When I tried it I left at least an inch or an inch and a half of the white end above the root. There needs to be enough of the actual onion to be able to grow and to get both water and air. So if you're wanting to do this, you'll have to think ahead and remember to not use as much of the onion as maybe you're used to (if you're like our family).