Sprouted Onion Question

Courtesy of some baby potatoes sitting too close, I have a braid of onions that have sprouted.  The bulbs were good sized (bigger than a baseball, smaller than a softball) and the ones that have sprouted have multiple shoots coming off them..  Can I, like potatoes, break the onion into separate pieces each sprout getting a chunk and replant?  

I'm not looking for them to rebulb, I figure plant them out front with the tulips and dahlias and let them flower for seed.

I've never tried it that way. I THINK you could peel off some of the outer layers (leaving roots intact) & plant them that way though. So you'd really end up with sets, only slightly bigger....

The growing point on a potato are the eyes all over the potato. The growing point in an onion is at the center. Onions are like garlic in that each clove is a "growing unit." In my experience, shallots bought at the store more often contain two or more cloves, but my store onions are almost always a single clove. Rarely, I'll cut into one and find it's two-in-one and starting to turn into two onions. You can plant the separated "cloves", or the whole onions, like onion sets as AtlantaMarie suggests -- or just the bottom portion(s) with the roots.  You may be able to root the tops separately, but I don't think the middle will regenerate with both the top and bottom removed.

This site shows a picture of what looks like rooted tops, and shows how much onion to leave if you cut off the bottoms. The onion shown had two centers, it could probably be cut in half vertically between the shoots at the later stage that's shown, but it doesn't look like it would have been easy to divide it when it was a whole onion:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Grow-Onions-from-Discarded-Onion-Bottoms/

So I said what the heck.  Peeled, broke apart and treated them like a set.  Some one remind me about March / April to post how they're doing.

This is what I got from one onion. Broke it into basically 6 starters.

One onion, several tops coming up.



Peeled main outer layers.  Two halves with multiple sprouts from each. (sorry sideways)


The final count, 7 separate bulblets.

I've never seen an onion split into so many parts, before! Thank you for sharing the photos. I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

Very interesting!  I have ever seen that many onionettes!

Huh.... interesting experiment! Can't wait to see how it turns out.

They've grown really well, only one problem, I have essentially a 100% bolt rate.

I can't necessarily blame the sprouted onions though, they've actually formed their flower stalks the latest. I had white onions from the store planted to, they're all essentially 100% bolt to flower to already.

Are you going to let them go to seed?  And then start the seeds?
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