Another impulse buy. I’m a newbie to growing onions but I had heard it was hard to find sets to plant. Home Depot had three different varieties but they didn’t list what day type they were. I chose the one listed as mild. This should be an interesting experiment in growing onions.
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I’ve found onion sets for sale at a Tractor Supply Company near me. I didn’t know much about them, but discovered through the growing process that day length matters for them to start bulbing, and that onions grown from seed instead of sets will generally store longer.
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Thanks
I absolutely love the idea of growing large quantities of garlic and onions for my own consumption, I just haven’t had success yet. I’ve tried garlic on several different occasions, and learned a lot about timing, but haven’t gotten much in the way of usable heads. Most were harvested rather small.
With the onion seeds that I have tried on several occasions I’ve gotten rather poor germination, and never a useful harvest. I am going to keep trying because I absolutely love these crops and I want to be successful. I think that it might be time for me to finally try the Green Mountain Multiplier Onions I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the forum.
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I bought Sweet Oversize, Stuttgarter, Snowball White, and Red Karmen onion sets from Urban Farmer this past fall. I was pleased with what they sent me. They were one of the only companies offering fall sets, but they offer them in the spring as well.
Also, if you have a Rural King in your area, they typically sell yellow, white, and red onion sets and seed potato… cheapest in town.
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For those who grow different kinds of onions, I recommend trying Nabechan bunching onions from seed.
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My plan was to buy seed but 90 bulbs for 3.98 seems to be a bargain. Now I have to determine the best time to plant.
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Exclusive! Better flavor than other bunching onions.
@Auburn That’s where I got them! I used a steel tooth rake to cultivate a patch of garden in the Spring, scattered seeds, and scantly covered with a 50/50 mix of sand and topsoil, then wet it down thoroughly with a spray mist. I used a hose spray head to hand water a few more times and then let some automated irrigation heads take over.
We let them grow oversize, about 3/4". They were awesome, both as chives as bulbs.
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I’ve had really good results with regrowing store bought green onions. When I cut them for a recipe, I leave about an inch of the root and white stem, put them into a teacup with enough water to cover the heel and set them in a sunny windowsill. When they have regrown a decent amount of roots I’ll take and plant them outside. One of the first times I tried this I got a very vigorous grower, and over successive years it grew a stalk to about waist -height and produced seed that I was able to harvest. None of the green onions that I’ve tried this with were ones that would actually produce a bulb, though.
My experience with regrowing those bunching onions caused me to do a similar experiment with yellow bulbing onions: I would cut them straight down the center of the root, and chop or slice the upper portion of the bulb, leaving roughly 3/4-1" of the base (with the root still attached), put those 2 half-root pieces in a small storage container in the fridge and keep them there until some new roots formed, and then plant them out. I seem to recall that somewhere between 50 and 75% would grow new tops, but between day-length issues and their less than premium sun-siting in my secondary garden area, I never got anything meaningful from them.
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they are sold in bulk in every hardware store and some mom and pop convenience stores here. onions are big here. they really like our soil and the French put onions in everything. my father used to pull one from his garden. peel it and eat lt like a apple or slice it and eat it on bread with butter. these werent sweet onions just the average yellow pungent ones. not for me.
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I grew from sets for years and was always disappointed in the size I was able to get. Then I read an article noting that since allium is a biennial, and an onion set is in its second year, an onion set is more interested in setting seed than sizing up its bulb. So, I began growing them from seed and have had great success. I start them in 32 cell trays dividing a packet between 2-4 cells with potting soil in the cell and covering the seed with seed starting mix. They germinate well this way, grow in a bunch, and are easily divided when planting out. I’m Upstate NY and therefore growing long day varieties.
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That looks like a simple way to get started. Thanks
I planted onion sets last year in the late spring that I bought on sale at Tractor Supply. They produced but of course they would have done much better if I had planted them in late winter/early spring. If I set them out this year, I will plant the sets as soon as the ground is workable.
A 30-foot row with the set spacing at 8"-10" will give a good crop. Keeping the weeds from taking over the onions is a chore. Harvested them in August (if I remember correctly).
Have your drying and storing plans figured out before you plant. I hanged mine from the ceiling of an enclosed back porch with a ceiling fan overhead.
Seemed like a lot of work for the few onions I harvested though.
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I read that years ago too. We typically start our own seeds as well. I bought sets this fall because I got super busy and didn’t start my fall sets to overwinter. Onions are very hardy. We don’t bother starting ours in plug trays. We start them in 4x4 inch pots (a sour cream bowl or something similar with a lid and drainage holes punched in the bottom with a knife works too) in January. We sow 30-50 seeds in each pot and cover with a plastic dome (you can use the lid if you use a recycled bowl). I check every few days after a week to see if they are up. Once they are up, I remove the lid, place them under lights (as close as possible) and feed once a week. They are very easy to separate and don’t mind if their roots are pruned a little. Doing it this way saves space. We start a lot of plants and have to conserve space.
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my father used to grow big onions from sets. most baseball or a little bigger. i wonder if they were different varieties as his didnt go to seed until they had got full size. i do remembering him pinching off the flowers then leaving them in the ground until frost to naturally die off. us kids used to tie them in bunches of 6 to hang in the cellar.
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my father used to let the lawn get a little long then mow it, leaving the clippings to dry in the sun. we would then go rake the dried grass into bags and used that to mulch our onions in early summer. kept the weeds down and also fed the soil.
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Lawn clippings would work to control weeds except it would put the wrong seeds into the garden. For that reason, something like oak leaves would be better as a mulch.
This discussion reminds me that I need to get my tiller to running this winter.
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not if its early summer clippings.
Onion sets are onions that are grown from seed in very crowded conditions, then forced to go dormant. Once dormant, they are packed and shipped to stores for sale. The disadvantage is that most of the large sets will immediately send up a flower spike which prevents a bulb from forming. Pick out the sets that are the diameter of a dime and plant them separate from the larger sets. The dime size sets will usually produce a large bulb. Pull the plants from the larger sets and use as scallions. Onion sets can be planted any time after the 1st of February. I usually put a few in for scallions while planting seed grown onions for large bulbs. Do NOT bury onion sets! They should barely be set into the soil so that the bulb can form above ground while the roots grow into the soil. There are a lot of ways to produce onions, but I prefer to make a bed 3 feet wide by about 20 feet long. I make short 3 foot long rows across the bed with a hoe handle and push onion sets into the channel every 4 to 6 inches. The short rows should be about a foot apart. Cultivate using a 4 prong garden tool between the rows to keep the soil loose and suppress weeds.
As others noted, onions come in 3 variants in terms of where they grow best. Long day onions are best from northern KY going up into Canada. Short day onions do best near the southern coast. Mid-day (day neutral) onions are adapted from the middle of Alabama up to northern KY. Sierra Blanco from Johnny’s is an outstanding mid-day onion. Now is the right time to start from seed!!!
How to start onion seed? I use a seed start tray with 4 inch cells. Fill each cell with promix-BX or comparable and carefully flatten the surface. Place a layer of onion seed on the seed start mix and cover with a thin layer of carefully crumbled seed start mix about 3/16 inch thick. It is very important not to plant onion seed too deep and similarly important that they are covered by at least some seed start mix. Use a water sprayer on very low pressure to settle the soil mix around the seed. Keep the seed tray watered (do NOT let it dry out) for about a week and most of the seed should germinate.
Planting onions will convince you that you’ve lost your mind. The best size onion plant to set out is anything from the thickness of a hair up to the size of a #2 pencil lead. It is not easy to handle the smallest plants so focus on getting seedlings to a size you can handle. Plant them in the ground any time from the 10th of March and they will reward you with an abundance of large onions. I was co-gardening with a 70 year old several years ago. He thought I had lost my mind when I came out with a tray of tiny onion plants and proceeded to plant them. He though a lot more about it when we hauled 2 wheel-barrow loads of onions out of that small bed!
Soil needs to be very fertile for onions. They do best with an abundance of organic amendments but a bit low on nitrogen. Rabbit manure makes an excellent soil amendment for onions.
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