Saving Seeds: Onions

With everything that went on July 4th and after (see my posts here) I forgot all about these guys. I save a lot of my own seeds for my garden. This picture is the seed head of an heirloom onion called Italian Red Bottleneck, which I obtained from the Seed Savers in Iowa. Each of the little bud like things was a small flower and now have several small black seeds in them.

You can see where one of the pods has split open, exposing the small black seeds. When a couple of pods have opened I go ahead and cut the whole stem and bring it into the house to finish drying out.

[edit]Which I did and now they are very dry and ready to clean, which hopefully I'll get to in the next day or so. In the meantime I will publish this post which should have been done back in July; don't know how it ended up still being a draft all this time....
I learned a lot about saving my own garden seeds from Carol Deppe's book, I think it should be on every gardeners reading list! She is a geneticist by training and a serious gardener. Her instructions are very easy to understand and implement in the garden.