Seed production

M. Maas Kruiningen BV is also producer of onionseed. Every year we grow seed in Italy.
Initially we only grew free varieties. The last 10 years we successfully specialized ourselves in breeding our own varieties. We have received plant breeder's rights on 2 varieties, Esther and Maas01. Especially with Esther we have high expectations.
The big advantage of breeding our own seed is that we relatively can produce cheap seed.

On the picture below you can see the breeding of stockseed of the variety Esther, which takes place in a plastic tunnel

This stockseed is later used to produce bulbs in the open field. Here below you can see some of the bulbs just pulled out from the field..

A selection from these bulbs are being planted later in the open field. Several months later these bulbs will make seed heads.
When these seed heads are ripened off, they will be harvested and dried, so that the seed can be taken out. Here below you see a seed head which is just cut off..

This happens manually, because the seeds are in the little flowers. When harvested with machines a lot of this seed would get lost.

Below we show you a nice picture of a big field with seed heads of Snowball: