When I started growing vegetables at Thorncliffe Park Community Garden a few years ago, my father-in-law Claus gifted me a few “multipliers.”

These were multiplying onions, and they are the gift that keeps giving.

In fact, because they never stop giving, and because you must keep planting and eating them going forward, they will guarantee your own immortality — much more so than cryogenic freezing, or belief in reincarnation, for example.

Planting: First, let’s talk planting. A single dried multiplier onion bulb planted in spring will give you two bulbs harvested in fall. Eat one, and keep the next for next year. Or leave your second bulb in the ground and it will overwinter and multiply next year.

Harvesting bulbs: Onions are also time travelers. You can harvest in the fall, dirt and all, leave them in a cool dry place, like your basement, and forget about them. Once the excitement of the holiday season is done, you can have a eureka moment when you remember where you left the onions. Then you can process your onions for a mid-winter harvest.

Processing simply involves shaking off any dried dirt, peeling off a few gnarly layers of onion skin, and finding a new container to keep them handy for cooking in your kitchen. The  lazy Susan works well. You can complete your processing on the dining room table while your better half prepares dinner. Careful to tidy up after! Identify multipliers as the ones that are not perfectly round — like the one near the bottom of this photo — it has a flatter side that used to press up against its multiplier twin.

Surprise! So enjoy this surprise winter harvest! To use your onions in some tasty winter dishes, such as crockpots, start with the larger ones first. Any little ones left over in early spring can be replanted. They may even start putting out some green shoots in your kitchen, which shows they are eager.

In spring time, any onions you missed in the fall harvest become volunteers for this season. They will declare themselves in due course when they push up green shoots from the dirt.

Harvesting greens: To get fresh greens close at hand, put a bunch of onion bulbs in a pot to keep handy outside your kitchen door in spring. Keep it watered and exposed to sun. Soon you’ll be out there with scissors picking off some of the fresh greens to put on top of pasta.

Savoring the harvest: Small onions go nicely in a crockpot in a dish such as lamb stew. When will simmered, they give a burst of rich flavor to complement the meat and other vegetable goodies and spices.

Here’s to your hereafter! So much going on with multiplier onions. They start as the gift that keeps on giving, and they end up guaranteeing your immortality.