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michael357

A new way for me to raise onions

Michael
10 years ago

first time posting in this forum. greetings all.

I've always planted my onions from seed with a Gardenway Planter and have excellent stands doing so. The problem with the planter is it takes a good deal of seed to fill the hopper enough to get the plate to pick up seed so, a fair amount of seed has to be purchased to use the planter with small seed veggies.

This year I decided to raise my own plants by planting seed in 6" pots and then transplanting them into the ground. Of course, transplanting is nothing new but, I've never tried growing the plants myself in containers and transplanting them. The 2 varieties, in separate pots. grew at different rates. Copra was the fastest, forget the other. Mom helped me plant the Copras and they are doing beautifully with a very high TP success rate. The other variety might have done as well but the growing medium was likely too wet at TP time making it difficult for the wife to separate the roots without damaging them. The TP success rate of the not Copra variety was pretty poor but they had to go in the day they did, wet potting mix or not.

As is always the case with growing and transplanting plants, timing is everything and when the weather fouls you up it only decreases your chance of success.

It also didn't help that I started them indoors about a month too soon. Our weather was cold much longer into Spring and far wetter than usual so the ground couldn't get prepared for the TPs to go in when I planned to do it. Maybe net year I'll do 3 plantings in pots at 2 week intervals just to be safe.

Speaking of mom, I'll bet she snuck some over wintering onions in a corner of one of my gardens last Fall, started harvesting the things about a month ago wondering what they were and where they came from. I've never grown the things before.

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