Indian Onions - Medicinal Properties And Growing On A Windowsill

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Indian bow - "ambulance" on the windowsill

Unpretentious and fertile

About five years ago, a work colleague gave me a small onion in a pot. “This is a very valuable plant - the Indian onion,” she said. I liked the onion, and I began to look after her, watching with interest what would come of her.

The plant turned out to be unpretentious, grew for itself and grew, increasing in size. Once, looking at the bulb, I found tiny children under the scales at the base. She did not touch them, deciding to let them grow and get stronger. When they reached about a centimeter in diameter, they fell off themselves. I transplanted them into separate pots with ordinary soil, they rooted safely and began to grow on their own. [Since then, I have produced countless offspring of the first bulb. She put the offspring in pots and gave them to friends. The onion mother herself also lives with me and is well. She has turned into a real giantess, the size of a couple of fists, or to be precise, her diameter is over 12 cm!

She seems to enjoy spending the summer at the dacha. For the last two years, after the threat of frost has passed, I plant the entire onion family in a garden bed in a sunny place (I bury only the roots and the lower part of the bulbs so that most of them stick out on the surface). With the "summer residents" I do not stand on ceremony - and without them there are enough cases on the site.

Life in the garden is good for them

Over the summer, the Indian bow grows prettier, matures, multiplies and multiplies. It remains for me to collect small onions, dig out the parents and transfer the whole family home. And this is where the problem arises: the overgrown onion requires more capacity and additional space on the windowsill.

Once, without immediately attaching the bow properly, I left it in the clods of the earth brought with it right in plastic bags, placing them in a corner on the floor. Days, weeks went by, and I kept putting off and putting off the transplant. The onion endured, waited, and then picked up and bloomed at the usual time. Then I began to water it, and it, as if nothing had happened, turned green with its emerald color, began to grow and develop. Having experienced pangs of conscience, nevertheless, I made an observation: onions are unpretentious, hardy, and its surplus can be stored for a long time in the same way as I involuntarily did. By the way, baby onions do not dry out as long as regular onions, which means that they can be sent.

He is also a flower

At about the third year of life, at the beginning of winter, the onions bloomed. The plant threw out a long, half a meter, arrow, topped with a dense brush with numerous star-shaped greenish-white flowers. They bloomed gradually and for a long time, starting from the bottom. When the upper flowers bloomed, the lower ones were already ripe seeds. I was very happy with them, collected and sowed in the hope of getting the bulbs. Did not work out.

As it turned out later, the experiment was doomed to failure, because Indian onion seeds cannot be set without pollination. And in winter, as you know, there are no pollinating insects in the apartment. However, do not be upset about this - onions give a sufficient number of children: from one adult onion you can get about twenty.

"Ambulance" on the windowsill

So, the Indian bow came to me by accident. I gained experience in growing it along the way. On the advice of experts, I tried to treat them with a piece of a sheet of whiskey when my head hurt, my lower back, when I caught sciatica. The pain disappeared quickly, although in the first minutes it burned approximately the same as from the finalgon, but unlike the ointment, the side effect of the onion passes quickly. To enhance the effect, a sore spot (lower back, for example) can be wrapped with something woolen.

I also use my "green doctor" to relieve itching from mosquito and midge bites. It is very convenient when you work on the site: the mosquitoes have bitten, and you go to the garden with Indian onions, break off a piece of a leaf and rub the bite site. It is also convenient at home: when at night the insidious "vampire" imperceptibly stuck to you, and you wake up from unbearable itching, get up and tear off the saving leaf, rub yourself and sleep peacefully on.

Of course, since the Indian bow settled with me, I tried to find out what is its value, which the donor told me about? For all its decorativeness, the main advantage of this plant is its medicinal properties. It is equated with such houseplants-healers as golden mustache, aloe.

The Indian onion (aka Chinese and Mongolian) belongs to the genus of poultry farms and is called the tailed poultry farmer, literally - Ornithogalum caudatum. He was nicknamed "tailed" for his flat, long (sometimes up to a meter, like mine), leaves hanging like a tail. He himself is from South Africa. It grows in the Mediterranean and other warm parts of the world.

Researchers of Indian onion have discovered the healing properties of its juice (mucus), which contains active substances that increase blood flow to diseased parts of the body (this is where the burning sensation comes from when rubbing), which provides pain relief for arthritis, sciatica, osteochondrosis, gout and even toothache (attach a piece of the sheet to the gum in the area of the aching tooth). Onion compresses help with bruises, abscesses, swelling, and cuts.

But, they say that the Indian onion is poisonous, which means that you should not use it inside - you can get poisoned.

However, toxicity is not a reason to abandon the plant. As Paracelsus said, depending on the doses - all the poison and all the medicine. How can one not remember poisonous snakes, radon, celandine (my friend cured her son of cancer with them) and many other things on earth that can be both killed and saved.

The properties of Indian onions, it seems to me, have not yet been fully studied, so it is better to use it only externally. In this case, there will definitely not be harm - it has been tested for yourself.