This Crop is WAY Better Than Onions (And Nobody Grows It Anymore)

British growers spend over £200 million a year on onions, and every single one must be regrown from scratch each season. There's a plant that survives a British winter unprotected, comes back on its own, and still tastes like the onion you already cook with. You won't find it on any seed rack, and most allotment starter guides skip right past it. In this video, we explore: → £157–215 million a year: what UK farmers earn from onions, on par with carrots → A 250g bag of onion sets at £6.95 — bought again every spring for as long as you keep growing → 15 alliums and perennial vegetables, each judged against damp soil and short midwinter daylight → Three-cornered leek: hardy, edible, and an offence to plant in England and Wales under Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 → Asparagus demands three full years with nothing worth cutting before its first harvest → Jerusalem artichoke will colonise an entire bed if you don't actively contain it → Modern bulb onions had their perennial traits bred out over generations — their wild relatives were tougher and longer-lived → Around 100,000 hectares of UK vegetables grown in the open, fully exposed to waterlogging and early frost → Elephant garlic produces bulbs several times the size of normal garlic — closer to a leek than true garlic → A one-off £3–5 starter batch that replaces yearly onion set purchases for good → Frost hardy down to minus 15°C with a mulch, and happy in chalk, clay, loam, or sandy soil → And at number one: the crop that beats a standard onion bed outright — comes back on its own, costs a fraction of yearly sets, and nobody stocks it for one simple reason that has nothing to do with whether it works Subscribe for more overlooked corners of the British plot.