Shallot growing trials.

[realfood]

Gardening Which has just published the results of their trials of shallot sets. Generally they got better results with the Spring sown ones with much heavier crops and less trouble with bolting.
For the Autumn planted ones, the best results were from Jermor.

For Spring sown the best were Golden Gourmet, Longor, Micor, Red Sun and Topper.

For seed sown, the best was Banana, followed by Ambition and Prisma.

[BarleySugar]

I don't know if you have all bought your shallots, but Dobies of Devon have free post and packing until 15th Feb on onions, garlic and shallots as well as seeds. I just put my order in, and they do still have some of the varieties mentioned above.

[Leeds_lad]

How long do garlic, onions and shallots keep to be regrown? Planning on getting some now and planting them early spring...

[snohare]

Any alliums you buy at present should keep well enough until it is time to plant them out. If you have some that have been harvested and you want to use those, well some varieties are better keepers than others, but I think that tends to mean either the flavour may go off, or the bulb may shrivel or become diseased in storage - things that don't concern the wild bulb sitting in the ground over winter.
I never can remember which ones are good keepers and which are not, so I'll not try to mislead you - but I always grow Golden Gourmet and Red Sun shallots, so one of those is good for long storage...the secret of storing all alliums is to keep them cool and dry.