Onions: A garden favorite
Tip: Don’t plant onions in the same place for more than three years in a row. You will start to get pink root, which is a fungus that affects the onion roots. Practice crop rotation with your onions to ensure a disease-free crop.
Not a scene from the Blair Witch Project... just onion harvest at our house.Onions are one of our favorite things to grow. Ron especially enjoys the annual challenge of growing the largest onions on record in our household. He has a couple secrets up his sleeve this year, so stay with us throughout the growing season to see how large he can get the onions to grow.
We use 1-year onion plants. These produce the best onions, in our opinion. Some garden centers say to use 2-year onion sets, but we often find these sets will go to seed and not produce as many onions.
Onions don’t like to be disturbed once they’re planted. They also don’t like to be overly wet or they will rot. When you see the onion bulbs start appearing, cut back on the water to get the best results.
In the same breath, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, the more you water the sweeter your onions, so there is a balance in how much water you should give your onions.
We pull a few onions each week starting about three weeks into the growing season. This gives us small onions to eat and enjoy as we thin the onion rows. It also allows us to check the quality of our onions so we can adjust watering levels, if necessary.
2019 Onions - July 8Thinning the onions also puts more space between the remaining plants, which allows for larger onions to be grown. We typically expect to harvest our full onion crop during the last two weeks of July.
Tip: You’ll know when to harvest onions when you see their green tops fall over. This will start in July, a few at a time, and by the end of July, all onions will be ready to be pulled.
When harvested, we tie the onions in bunches and hang them from a tree in the shade to dry (or cure). This process of drying the onions will make them ready for winter storage so we can enjoy onions all winter long. Well… at least that’s our plan, but with four daughters, we’re typically out of onions by the end of December.
Be sure to stick with us all growing season long and we’ll share photos of our gardens and the produce as we harvest it. And let’s see if Ron can top last year’s onion size!
“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” — Liberty Hyde Bailey, American Horticulturist
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