Onion sets

 

A few of my onion sets have sent up flower stalks.  Should I pull them
now for green onions, or will the bulbs continue to grow?  (I know they
won't keep if I harvest them in the fall)

Next year I'll sort them by size before planting, and only plant the
tiny ones shallow in a row for big onions, and plant the bigger ones
deep and in a bunch for green onions.

I know seeds is the way to grow big onions, but I haven't had much luck
with that -- except one year when I planted leeks...

Bob

 

zxcvbob said:

I'd pull the ones with flower stalks for green onions while the stalks are
still tender.

Onion seed needs to be very fresh for good germination.  

Seedling onions transplant pretty easily, so can be started in pots.
Wash the potting soil off the roots and tease the plants apart, but
don't get too paranoid about saving all the roots.  The little onions
are pretty tough.  (It helps keep things managable if you trim the
tops back a bit a week or so before you intend to plant them out.)

Or, you can mail order bundles of onion seedlings. (This is what
I do now, after years of starting them from seeds.)


--
Pat in Plymouth MI
    
"Vegetables are like bombs packed tight with all kinds of important
nutrients..."     --Largo Potter, Valkyria  Chronicles
 
email valid but not regularly monitored
  

 


My wife lets some of the onions stay in the ground over the winter.
We're in the Baltimore area so it does freeze around here, although
not as severe as Michigan. She digs up the onions in the spring as
needed for the table.

Paul

 




    Some of mine did, too, in the very early spring; well, late
winter.... I think it's fairly commonplace.

    Yes and yes. Regardless, you'll need to eat those first. DW&I
ate'em straight from the garden.

    Unless they're prepackaged, sort them when you buy them! I do that
every year, looking for sets that just cover my l/h pinkie nail. I'm
sure it distracts the nursery folks but it's my money and time. I've
always read/heard that smaller sets produce larger bulbs. Dunno for
sure; it's anecdotal but what-the-hell.
    For green onions, I succession-plant those little white spherical
onions that are so ubiquitous on seed stands; I don't know what they're
called. At any rate, I plant them really closely together in containers
near other culinary herbs so that for most of the year (except for
mid-July through mid-Sept) DW and other interested neighboring cooks
have a ready supply of tender green shoots. I pull them ruthlessly as
they mature in order to use the space for tender new ones.

 

balvenieman@invalid.net wrote:


My grandmother used to have "multiplying onions" that never bloomed
and never went dormant -- this was in Houston, Texas.  They looked
like scallions, but the taste was a little different. (I figured out
later that they taste like shallots.)  They just kept dividing like
chives and the clump got bigger and bigger.  You'd pull up a clump,
and break one off and replant it.

I've tried planting shallots and using them green.  They taste right,
but they don't endlessly multiply.  I wonder if day length has
anything to do with it?  In Houston, the days never get much longer
than 14 hours, and up here they get well over 16 hrs long.  Maybe what
she had was a long-day variety of "potato onion", or a confused shallot.

Bob