ISSUE 70, EXTRAORDINARY VEGETABLES, Part 6: Excel Yellow Bermuda Onion
Excel Yellow Bermuda Onion
The brutality of the vegetable market should daunt anyone with the ambition to get into vegetable breeding. Scores of superlative vegetables have been created, launched, won awards and good reviews, and were then wiped from gardens, fields, and plant catalogs by another introduction much like it but with one or two different traits. Back in the heyday of USDA breeding, before most vegetable creation was taken over by universities and ag companies, numbers of excellent vegetables issued from regional USDA centers. In 1948 the USDA rolled out the Excel Bermuda, a yellow sweet onion. Maturing 10 to 14 days earlier than conventional Bermuda onions, the Excel had several signal virtues: it was slow bolting, it didn’t split, and it manifested uniform color in mass plantings. The joint creation of breeders in the Texas and California USDA experimental stations, the Excel was extensively field tested in the Imperial Valley before its release.
During its trial grow-outs, the onion bore the designation “986”. Word of its quality spread through the vegetable world. People had not expected the onion to do well in long storage, yet it retained crispness and sweetness longer than any other Bermuda sweet onion. It was also discovered during trialing that the variety would not perform well in the North. It required heat and a touch of dryness for optimum growth.
Almost immediately breeders at the Texas Experimental Station began imaging the glorious things that would happen in Excel were crossed with one of the famous Texas-bred Grano sweet onions. The Excel would be the seed mother. It would be pollinated by the Texas Early Grano 591. The result? The most famous onion created in the latter half of the 20th century—the Granex. We know the Granex as the Vidalia Onion, or perhaps the Washington Sweet Onion if we are on the West Coast. The pleasant, dulcet crispness of the Granex exceeded even the Excel. With breath-taking swiftness, the Excel vanished and the Granex, rebranded in several forms after its 1952 launch, became the reigning sweet onion in the United States. By 1960 not an Excel was to be had in the United States.
The American Seed Selection did not honor the Granex Onion. Judges thought it too similar to its parent, the Excel, which has won in 1948. Yet the judgment of history has been decisive. America chose the Granex/Vidalia/Washington Sweet. The All American Selection site lacks even a photograph of the vegetable to commemorate its short sweet reign in the regard of horticulturists. The photograph at the article’s head is of the Yellow Bermuda onion, the tardy growing variety that Excel was supposed to supplant.