What were the soil temps for the onion seeds? I have had failures when I put my onions on the same heat mat system I use for tomatoes and eggplant. Although the literature says high 70’s is the optimum germination temp for onion seed, in practice is was a total flop for me. I went back to starting onions at room temp soil and have been fine since.
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I start mine in my ‘grow closet’ where temps stay around 80f typically. No bottom heat for me.
How old was your seed? Onion seed definately doesn’t last long. I can go two years but the third is iffy. Unlike most other seed that i’ve found lasts way longer than official reports say. I’ve never had trouble with germination in much cooler soil temps, inside or outside. Certainly less than 70. It’s njce you could find plants locally. Wouldn’t want to be without onions! All my variations - plants, sets, seed for next year’s sets, and bulbs for next years seed - are all setted in to my garden now. Sue
My redwing are from 2015, copra 2012. I store my seeds in the freezer during the off season. Not sure germination rate, but enough germinated to make plenty for planting… I think the problem a lot of people have is they dont store their seeds properly. Keeping them dry is critical and dont allow moisture to collect in the container when thawing. Let them warm to room temp before opening/handling. I put silica gel packs in with my seeds to make sure there is no excess moisture.
I started them at room temperature. Same way I started my tomatoes. I did not realize they needed more heat. I had just purchased the seeds from seedsnow.com which is also where I got the tomatoes.
I can see that you’re using a wire storage rack like this, which sometimes goes on sale for half off or so. Sorry for the dumb question, but what are you using for lights? Is it just a little fluro setup like this?
This is somewhat embarrassing to post here but I tried starting walla walla onions for fall planting in a southeast facing window, and they sprouted pretty good but then did poorly enough that I only had enough to plant two small rows. Thanks to the unexpected late summer heat and my lack of watering, I now have two walla walla onions (not rows, just two single onions) in the garden right now. At least with two onions I’ll get my money back, since this was from the Christmas Tree Shop clearance rack and I got it for less than 20 cents.
they are led strips i assembled myself. onions can be tricky, took me a while to get them figured out. keeping soil moist seems to help a lot, along with starting from seed instead of sets. also they like fertile soil and full sun.
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Beautiful onions. How many feet of row did you plant?
Germination rates on bought seed has been hit or miss for me, so I grew out some of last year’s for seed. I just threshed mine yesterday. Some didn’t thresh so clean as yours. I think they weren’t dry enough. It’s hard to dry stuff here with our high humidity. Looking forward to using my own seed next year. 
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what i did was dry the heads whole in a brown paper bag. the seed pods open up while drying. then i put them in a plastic bag and shook the heck out of them. not all the seeds came out but this is what did. seed heads stayed pretty intact and were discarded. if u want cleaner seeds u can lay a sheet on the ground. set a box fan on a chair at one end and turn it on. drop the seeds slowly in front of the fan from above and a foot or two out and it will blow the chaff farther as it falls than the seeds. you can get them pretty clean like that, if u want to bother…
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Nice onions and seeds @TheDerek. Just curious, were the onions you got seed from ones you started from seed this year or 2nd year onions? It is supposed to make a difference in their offspring going to seed the first year when you plant their seeds, but I have never tested that theory.
The seeds were from 2nd year onions. When I harvested last year I replanted the smaller onions in a different location where they regrew this year.
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What a beautiful crop! The finger wagging at the dogs cracks me up and reminds me of a basset hound I had. She would steal onions from the garden and devour them (I know they’re not good for dogs). She would deny she did so, but her breath always gave away the truth.
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I ran across this post today. The author wrote Sustainable Market Farming and lives one zone cooler here in VA, so much of the info is helpful here. I’d not tried this method of planting onion seed in the fall but might give it a go this year. Anyone ever try this?
We developed a system of growing onion starts in our hoophouse over the winter and transplanting them bare-root outdoors in very early March. I wrote about choosing onion varieties for your latitude last month. There I explained that to grow big onions we need to have large transplants on March 1, so we can have big vegetative plants before bulbing is triggered by the daylength.
The method involves making two sowings of bulbing onions, each enough for the whole planting. This provides insurance in case one date turns out better than the other. Then we follow this up with a partial third sowing to make up numbers of any varieties that didn’t germinate well. We make our first sowing November 10, our second November 20, and a third on December 5 as a back-up in case of problems. Our formula is: divide the number of onion plants wanted by 20, to give minimum length of row to sow, in feet. And sow this amount twice, 10 days apart. The onions will be planted out at 4" (10 cm) apart. We add 20% to provide some slack. For a final row of 100’ (30.5 m), we’d need 100’ × 3 per foot × 1.2 (adding 20%) plants. 360 plants. We sow 3 seeds per inch (approx. 1 cm apart), 36 per foot (30 cm). At this sowing rate, we need 120", or 10’ (3 m).
See The Year-Round Hoophouse for more on growing onions this way. If we find ourselves with extra onion plants in March, we usually re-categorize them as scallions. But we have also transplanted them in early March in a single row along the south edge of hoophouse beds, for an early crop. We got good onions but they dwarfed the pepper plants behind them. Maybe planting them on the north side of the bed is better?
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