We always {try to} start our onion seeds in September. In years past, the process looked something like this: start seeds in one container, then once they’re up good, separate and plant in wood flats for overwintering in the greenhouse. After spending the winter in the greenhouse, it takes a couple weeks to harden them off before they’re able to be transplanted into the growbags. It is a process that has worked, but it is many steps – and you lose not a few onions along the way. This year, we tried something different.
Instead of transplanting young onion sprouts into the wood flats, we sowed the seeds directly. {We also tried soil blocks: the onions came up great – and then fizzled. Not sure why, but that’s what experiments are for: discovery}. The onions in the flats came up beautifully, and instead of moving them to the greenhouse, we kept them outside all winter. At first in the driveway, but we moved them to the porch when the cold settled. They got covered at night, and did get frost-nipped once or twice, but came through winter looking healthy and strong.
With no need to harden off, we were able to start moving them to the garden as soon as we got the grow bags ready – and they’ve seemed very happy and healthy during the whole process.
After planting 100ish onions for ourselves, we had so many extra onions we’ve been able to supply our friends and family! Sharing the garden love is one of our favorite aspects of gardening, whether it’s plants or produce, so being able to see our onions in so many gardens is fabulous.
It’ll be midsummer before harvesting, so there’s several months of growing still to happen, but they’ve already grown so much and we look forward to seeing how this experiment plays out.
Have you ever grown onions? What’s your favorite tip or trick?
Wow what wonderful results. Those do look happy and healthy 🙂 I have never grown onions.
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I’ve never grown onions this way until we got married, so it’s been a huge learning experience 🙂 And we are just tickled pink how happy they look this year 😀
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Think of the homemade French onion soup. Yummm…
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Oh man, that’s the dream. Yummmmm indeed! 😀
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I have only ate them 😄. Not a garden person but those onions look really good.
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Eating them is at least half the fun! 😀 Thanks, we are pleased with them this year ❤
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It looks like they’re doing fantastically, how wonderful. I look forward to seeing how they continue to grow. Wow around 100 is one hell of a lot of onions. How lovely having enough to share 🥰
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Ideally we’d like to get to the point where we can grow and store enough onions to last a year – which would be a good deal more than 100, lol… We use onions all the time so it takes a lot 😉
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Yes that’s a very good point 😂😂 they do seem to pop up in a wide variety of dishes. Good luck getting to that point.
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[…] has been the month of transplants and watching things grow, and I’ve been able to share our onion experiment {they are growing so good, y’all!} and a garden “tour.” With tomatoes and peppers […]
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[…] start-to-finish thing we do in the garden, it is one of the easiest as well. As mentioned in The Onion Experiment, we start our onions from seeds rather than buying onion sets. It definitely takes longer, but […]
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