Talk to me about Onions

Okay, I top dressed my onions, strawberries and lettuce with compost today.  Everything's looking great...

Marc Iverson wrote:So have either of you decided to do anything differently with your onions next year?

I watered my onions more this year than I had in previous years. For some reason, previously, I thought I didn't want to water them too much as they were bulbs and would rot. But this year I've been watering them twice a week along with the rest of the SFG. They do seem a bit bigger this year but not softball size.

So my question now is, as with garlic, do we stop watering at some point? The tops of a lot of them have fallen over but some are still upright. And do we treat shallots the same way? All my shallots are laying down.

CC

I've read that it's best to stop watering garlic and onions two weeks before harvest.

CC with the Shallots let them stay in un til they release from the soil easily. If there is any resistance of the roots when pulling gently, let them stay a few more days.

Onions come from hot dry sunny climes so do go over watering them or all you'll do is end up with lot's of thick green tops that give you the flower , seeds and very poor bulbs .
Don't make the ground too rich in nutrients either  or again it'll be all tops & no bottoms .

My experience for getting on for 50 yrs of various sorts of gardening.:-

  Most  tops fall over on their own , with these I gently ease the plant up an inch or so with a small hand fork taking sure that I don't pierce the onion bulb
 This helps the onion take on a quick spurt of growth before going into the closing down ripening stage without going through the wasteful  flowering stage .
 By the time it comes to the clearing of the square it's a rare occurrence for me to have had to bend any of the tops over to cause the crop to ripen .

About 10 days after the easing up exercise , most of the tops will have gone the light orangy brown colour.  This is when I pull the onion , either for use in the kitchen there & then or if there are a lot of them to place them on a chicken wire frame so that the sun and air can get around the bulb to fully ripen it and dry the outer layers a little to help with the long term storage & to turn any green in the stalks into the dried straw colour which in turn sees the stalk become much thinner , softer  and dried grassy so it's easy to plait .

 If I have a dozen or so onions at the same time in this finished state with nicely withered tops I plait them up into strings and hang them up under the office verandah taking them inside it .just before the first frost

Last November before the first frost  we planned for an onion a day through out the next year & so got cracking doing it in two stages.
Thus we planted 100 big Sturton Giant onion sets @ 9 per square foot as these often make 3 " plus bulbs, &  50 purple onions .. Some of the purple ones have bolted but pinching out the flower head seems to have returned them to bulb growth These may or may not store well ) .

Then in late Feb this year we planted the rest of the crop as main crop onions .....another 150 Giant Sturton onions again @ 9 per sq foot . These should be harvest-able on early August
 I have used scissors to snip off weeds rather than pull the weeds out as the disturbed soil around the onion roots would attract the dreaded onion fly .

  I very carefully side dressed all the onions about 10 days ago with a garden shop  available compound mix of " dried blood meal, dried fish meal  & dried bone meal " ( DFB&BM ) taking great care not to get any inside the folds /crook of the onion leaves as it rots them very quickly if it gets wet .

So I can put some in for a Fall crop here in northern Ohio?

Scorpio Rising wrote:So I can put some in for a Fall crop here in northern Ohio?

you need to do some research for an adequate answer.
eg: first frost date, day long or short onions, etc.check out the rookie topics and the search feature.

camprn wrote:

Scorpio Rising wrote:So I can put some in for a Fall crop here in northern Ohio?

you need to do some research for an adequate answer.
eg: first frost date, day long or short onions, etc.check out the rookie topics and the search feature.

Thanks, camp!  I am figuring it out!  It is fun, I Just bought some lettuce!

Now I'm confused!  (About onions, that is.)

I recently read that one should NOT give onions haircuts, since that would reduce the size of the bulbs.  Which is correct?  Either or neither?

I did notice that the ones with scapes that I chopped off were small.

I'm with this guy on growing omions- worked for me: Try This

Interesting video, Yardslave.

Thanks for the video. I wonder if I plant my sets too deep. They sure don't sit above the Mix like the ones in the video and the following video.

donnainzone10 wrote:Now I'm confused!  (About onions, that is.)

I recently read that one should NOT give onions haircuts, since that would reduce the size of the bulbs.  Which is correct?  Either or neither?

I did notice that the ones with scapes that I chopped off were small.

Onions are biennial, meaning it takes two growing seasons for then to mature.

When choosing onion sets for planting, choose the smallest ones you can find as these are the least likely to flower (send out scapes) and go to seed, as larger sets will do.

Onions that send up scapes are to be used first as they have completed the life cycle, become soft and are unsuitable for storage.

IN regards to trimming the foliage, just snipping the tips of the foliage will induce new growth, thus increasing the size of the bulb, or so i've been told.

http://www.gardensmart.tv/?p=articles&title=How_To_Grow_Onions

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/archives/parsons/vegetables/onion.html

https://organicgardeningnewsandinfo.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/tips-for-growing-onions-with-large-bulbs/

Thanks, Camp!  I saved all three articles.