Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Hope you're feeling nice and

spooky. Today we're talking about onions and we're doing a battle. We're talking about

should you grow onions from sets or should you grow onions from

seedlings. I have a real penchant for root crops right now. I'm looking for a

relatively low effort fall garden and to me that means root crops avoiding things

like brassica's in my garden because here in zone 10b brassica's I think really everywhere

get just decimated by all sorts of pests and diseases.

Those cabbage loopers and those cabbage moths are certainly suspect number one and

number two. But back to the onions. I really love them. I eat

them all the time and one of my monstros is grow things that you actually like to

eat. So even though onions are relatively cheap, I want to participate in that

natural process of growing these onions and so we're going to talk about why you

would maybe go with sets versus seeds. Now to answer that question you have to understand the life

cycle of the onion plant itself. By nature in nature onions are actually a

biennial plant which means they have a two-year life cycle.

So what happens naturally is they will grow from a seed to a plant and then to a dormant bulb

in their first year because the frost will kill off the

greens on top and they'll be dormant, they'll be forced dormant in their first year.

And then in the spring, after they go through that cold season the bulb will start to grow again and it will produce a flower spike and then it gets fertilized it produces seeds those seeds drop to the ground and then the life cycle

completes and then restarts. What happens is as gardeners what we're doing we

don't really care about year two. We're kind of rude.

We don't care about year two of the onion growth generally speaking.

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