October 23, 2017

When I lived in Oregon growing bulb onions was never a problem. Seeds, plants, or sets they all seemed to work fine. 

I knew that there were three different day length regulated onion types: long day,intermediate day and short day and their geographically suited locations.. Being near the 45 parallel, Oregon was solidly in the long day onion country.

 When I moved to far west Texas I thought that growing bulb onions would be a piece of cake too. How wrong could I be. 

I like growing from seeds because there are far more variety choices available than when you purchase plants or sets. Sets are those little "seed" onions. I am not sure how they are grown, since onions are biannual. This means it takes 2 years to produce seed. The first year is to form a bulb and the second year the bulb is food so the onion can produce seed. This is what confuses me about sets. By my calculations the sets would be year one, they should only produce green onions then go to blooming? 

This biannual thingy was my hang up for growing bulb onions. 

My thought was , in order to get nice sized onions I needed to have "nice" sized plants going through the winter. This was my folly, and the root of my non success with bulb onions.

As mentioned above Onions are biannual. Mother nature can play tricks on your bountiful onion harvests and make those large plants bolt and only be good for green onions.

I finally got  my Eureka!! moment when purely by  chance I found the solution in a gardening book written for the south.The book stated that onion plants need to go through the winter less than 1/4 inch in size. Plants that are 1/4 inch or larger are considered (in the onion world) to be mature plants. When winter temps drop below 50 degrees for a sustained amount of time, the bolting clock for these "mature" plants is set. They WILL bolt. This was an eye opening statement.

Taking a key from the 1015 onion, I decided to start my onion seeds on the 15th of October.  This did not turn out well! The plants were above the 1/4 inch rule. So the next year I decided to delay sowing until the first of November. 

I have found that there can be some complications with sowing this late in the year. This is especially true if the year is cold and damp, this can be the recipe for dampening off. I lost a crop to learn this lesson.

That year in order to have an onion crop I had to order plants. When the plants arrived the yellow onions were a perfect size but the red onions were 1/2 inch. Bad news since it was also a cool spring. Lots of red-green onions. It was interesting to be able to predict that outcome.

The next year after sowing the seed beds, Actinovate (an organic fungicide) was periodically applied. This was to keep the chances of dampening off  controlled.

Anyway it has been a slow steady learning curve of trial and error, but success has been achieved on a regular basis. Who would have thought it would have taken so many years to do this!

A heads up notice!

It does look like a cooler cold front is on the way and will also be some of the coldest weather this fall. It may be prudent to cover.  I am seeing a low of 37 predicted.