40: How to Grow Onions Successfully

The Beginner's Garden with Jill McSheehy

Jill McSheehy

How To, Education, Home & Garden, Leisure

4.7 • 830 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2018

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Though easy to plant, it's not always a sure bet that you'll get huge onion bulbs each season. In fact, onions can be a bit finicky.

In this episode of the Beginner's Garden Podcast, I go over the "long and short" (pun intended -- you'll understand after you listen to the episode) of growing onions. I talk about:

which onions you need to grow for your latitude
when to plant
when NOT to grow from seed
what triggers bulb growth
what causes bolting (when an onion sets seed instead of producing a bulb)
what to do if your onion plant does bolt

Show notes at http://journeywithjill.net/2018/02/grow-onions-successfully/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey Withjil.net, and my goal is to about yours? I have been planning my garden for a few months and now I'm starting to get to actually plant.
0:40.2	One crop I'm getting ready to plant very soon is onions. You may have heard me talk about my big
0:46.9	goal for onions this season. I want to harvest enough to last all year. Now, I know this is a huge goal. Even in my best season, I had enough to last all year. Now, I know this is a huge goal. Even in my best season, I had enough to
0:58.0	last about six months, but I can only try, right? For me, onions keep well in my pantry for a few
1:04.5	months, and when they start to show signs of deteriorating, I chop and freeze them in bags. How would you
1:10.8	like to have onions at the ready
1:12.2	for a few months without having to purchase them? This will be my sixth season to grow onions,
1:19.1	and I've had mostly decent years, one awesome year, and a couple of pitiful years. I love growing
1:27.2	onions, but they aren't without their challenges.
1:29.9	So what I want to do in this podcast episode is give you the basics of an onion's growth
1:34.8	in order to help you have the best harvest of onions you can have. As we'll talk about at the end of
1:41.1	this episode, in my experience, Mother Nature affects onions
1:45.0	more than other crops, so understand you can't control everything. But hopefully by understanding
1:51.3	them better and learning from my mistakes, you will have a satisfactory harvest yourself.
1:57.3	I want to start out talking about an onion's basic growth habit because we really need to understand
2:03.0	how it grows and how the bulbs form to really understand how we can best grow onions in our
2:09.9	own gardens.
2:11.5	The first thing we need to know is they are a cool season crop, but they also take a long
2:16.9	time to grow. So for those of you guys in
2:19.6	the South, that makes growing onions a little bit tricky. I know in our area, sometimes we
2:25.8	have a tendency to go from winter to summer really quickly. So that makes it difficult to grow
2:31.5	some cool season crops, but it totally can be done. So if you're in the South, don't give up yet.
	...

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