Neha was helping her mother by cutting the vegetables. She observed that there were some onions with long shoots. Thinking that the onions were rotten she went to throw them in the dustbin. Her mother told her those were the sprouted onions. 1) How does the reproduction take place in onions ? 2) Give two advantages of vegetative propagation.
Answers
1. Onions reproduce either with seeds or by bulbils (little bulbs) that form from lateral buds. After the first growing season, mature bulbs can be left in the ground or dug up and replanted. Either way the plant will undergo a period of dormancy, then grow during the next growing season.
2. Advantages of vegetative propagation
The main advantage of vegetative propagation methods is that the new plants contain the genetic material of only one parent, so they are essentially clones of the parent plant. This means that, once you have a plant with desirable traits, you can reproduce the same traits indefinitely, as long as the growing conditions remain similar. This is especially important for commercial growers who want to reproduce the highest-quality plants and ensure consistency of a variety of plant or crop for sale. This can also help to maintain consistent quality and taste in products made from plants or crops. For example, in Zealong’s tea plantation, they propagate new tea plants using cuttings to ensure consistency in the taste and quality of their tea.
With vegetative propagation, plants also bypass the immature seedling phase and therefore reach the mature phase sooner. This can save a lot of time and money for commercial plant production. For example, it takes 3–4 years for a tea plant to grow big enough (from a cutting) to be ready for harvesting and processing into tea. Growing from seed would take even longer.