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Growing Onions (2010 crop)
You can grow onions from seed, but I am fairly certain most people plant sets. An onion set is a small onion (less than 1 inch in diameter) that you simply plant in the ground. We can by a pound of these for $1.39 around here, so it is more expensive than seed, but much, much less labor intensive. Anyway, we got about two pounds of generic white onions and planted them in two rows about two feet apart. The individual bulbs are planted about 3-4 inches apart to make room for the growing onions as they mature. We just barely cover these with soil, leaving just a tad of the top exposed to the light to encourage growth.
You can grow onions from seed, but I am fairly certain most people plant sets. An onion set is a small onion (less than 1 inch in diameter) that you simply plant in the ground. We can by a pound of these for $1.39 around here, so it is more expensive than seed, but much, much less labor intensive. Anyway, we got about two pounds of generic white onions and planted them in two rows about two feet apart. The individual bulbs are planted about 3-4 inches apart to make room for the growing onions as they mature. We just barely cover these with soil, leaving just a tad of the top exposed to the light to encourage growth.
Within a couple of weeks the onion greens shot up seemingly overnight!
Continued good growth through mid-June.
By July 5th, the onions had reached this size.
By late August disaster had struck. The hot, dry summer had dried up all the onions. I dug these up and they
were maybe 50% larger than the seed onions I planted! And they were strong as hell. I blame this on the poor
soil that just simply dried out in the summer sun. Next year I am going to add more organic amendments to
the ground in the hopes of a better crop.