long day means the onions need to be grown in the northern states where daylight hours of the growing season are longer than the daylight hours of the south. when I lived in Massachusetts it was light earlier in the a.m. & did not get dark until 10 p.m.

Really, Susan? I didn't know that! I learn something new everyday.

They said the same thing as Susan :)

I really had no idea we had shorter days down here. We get so much hotter, I would have assumed we had longer days (more sun time). I guess I should brush up on my geography stuff ;)

Here is a link that might be useful: Long Day Onions

Thanks for the info and the link, lisa_h, that was helpful indeed. Now the question is have I wasted my space and time? Planted sweet onions in packages from Atwoods last couple of days, and I'm in Stillwater. Will I only have green onions this year? And where do you get the short-day onions usually? Do you have to order or can they be found in available garden stores?

It seems to me from what I have seen that if the stores are selling "plants" suited to the area, you will see about a 4:1 ratio of short day to long day onion transplants. I can't say for sets or bulbs, as I don't usually bother with those. Atwoods should have lots of transplant bundles for short-day varieties, unless they are sold out at the moment.

Dixondale Farms has maps that show where long-day, intermediate-day and short-day onions can be grown. I'll link that page below. In a nutshell, it is the day length (in gardening terms this refers to the number of hours of sunlight in a day) that tells onions when to start bulbing up. Because the day length varies from shorter in the southern continental USA to longer in the middle of the continent and longest very far north, you need to choose the onion varieties that bulb up in whatever day length you have in your area. Short day types are grown in areas with a day length of 10-12 hours, intermediate types in areas with 12-14 hours, and long day types in areas with 14-16 hours. The onions automatically begin bulbing up when the day length reaches whatever is appropriate for a given variety no matter when they were planted. This is why really late planting generally fails---the onions aren't in the ground long enough before they start bulbing up.

Your mention of your grandparents and parents being gone made me think about how much I miss my gardening grandparents, dad, aunts, uncles , and gardening friends and neighbors who are gone now too. I still think of them often when I'm in the garden and am grateful I grew up surrounded by people who loved to grow virtually anything and everything. I do think that this forum is the next best thing to having a family member or neighbor with whom you can discuss gardening....it is just that instead of chatting over the backyard fence, we're chatting in our electronic neighborhood.

For as far back as I can remember (so, likely back to about the mid-1960s), my dad would buy the onion sets that were sold as tiny dried bulbs in net packages, or sometimes in perforated plastic bag type packages, would plant them and they'd grow green foliage, but wouldn't bulb up into large bulb onions. The reason was that we were living and gardening in a short-day area in Fort Worth, TX, and the varieties of sets sold back then were long-day varieties. It wasn't until he started buying bundles of young onion plants out of boxes at the local nursery that he started have success with onions. His family had grown them from seed when he was a kid, but he never knew there was a difference in day-length needs among onion varieties and was mystified about why the dry bulb sets never bulbed up into big onions for him. For the most part, the dry bulb sets sold still are long-day types (I have no idea why) but every now and then I'll see some labeled "southern type" or "southern variety", but I've never tried any of those to see how they perform here.

Most of us in Oklahoma can grow short-day and intermediate-day types of onions. Some people in extreme northern Oklahoma can grow at least some of the long-day types and get them to bulb up, though they may not bulb to be as large as the same varieties grown much further north.

Down here in southern OK I plant both short-day and intermediate-day types and they perform equally well.

I have tried a couple of the long-day types here and they bulbed up a little bit but didn't get very big and really weren't worth growing in terms of getting a small yield for the space devoted to them.

One of the latest breakthroughs in onion breeding, by the way, is day length neutral onions that will produce anywhere. The only one of them I've grown is Superstar, and it produces wonderful sweet white onions. It usually is lumped in with the Intermediate types in catalogs, though some of them do mention its day length neutral status.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Dixondale Farms Day Length Map and Info

The onion plants here in southern OK first arrived in stores in January, but some of them still have some unsold bundles in wooden crates outside in the garden center areas., so I assume that would be true in stores further north in the state too.You can try looking there. Down here I only see onion varieties I recognize as short-day or intermediate day length types, buy in northern OK you may see long-day length types too. Hopefully the bundles still for sale still are in good shape and are not excessively dehydrated.

If your little bulbs were listed as southern types or if they had a variety name that is a southern type (you could Google the name to see), you should get onion bulbs and not just greens from the bulbs you planted. You likely still could put transplants into the ground now, too, and they'd grow and produce just fine. It is only the tiniest bit late to be planting onion plants in your part of the state.

Dawn

Thanks okiedawn for the link and the advice. Apparently I planted super sweet bulbs, no name variety and just noted small writing on bottom of package says"sweet green salad onions"...guess I'll get green onions, not bulbs. Well will certainly have the needed info for next year and can't thank you guys enough for taking the time to answer and explain things to me. I'll look at the the Mill and again at Atwoods but even if no results will do better next yr. Thanks again, Jill

We just got back from Ft. Smith Ar. a couple of hours ago, there was a large supply of Dixondale and Bonnie plants (bulbs also but I seldom buy bulbs). The bulbs looked good but the plants did not. You would have to pick through them to find nice looking plants. I also have been noticing how the quality seems to be dropping in all the areas I go, I think it is harder for the merchants to maintain their profit margin. I am also not seeing as many 6 and 9 packs of plants.

A number of years ago I tried the small dried onion sets, along with the regular onion transplants. The transplants did well, but the dried onion sets just made onions with very big necks which did not bulb up. After doing a bit of research I figured out that what I had was long day onions. So, I left them in the ground until sometime in July or so. They then made very big bulbs. They were baseball to softball in size. That was an unusual year in that it was rainier and cooler than normal for Oklahoma. In a regular year, or in years like the past couple, I am quite sure I would not have gotten the sized onions I did that year. So, you could get lucky like I did if the summer turns out cool and wet, but I wouldn't bet on it. Part of the fun of gardening is that it is a continual learning process, no matter whether it is your first year or your twentieth.

In that same year I scattered onion seed in the row where I had planted the transplants. They came up that spring and made onions about the size of baseballs. Also, I had a person give me six or seven bundles of transplants which were dried out and awful looking. Since they were free, I thought "why not" and went ahead and planted them This was several weeks after I planted all of my other onions. They also made baseball size onions. I guess in the right year it is hard to go wrong. The past few years have not been one of those type years.

The moral of the story I guess is that it is worth trying different things. Sometimes you get lucky. But, it is best to do your research and plant the right varieties at the right time, in the right location. Even then things can and do go awry, but you've tipped the odds in your favor as much as you are able.

I bought Dixondale plants as usual and they were beautiful when they arrived. I took awhile getting all of them in the ground, but finally did plant them all except for less than one bundle and another bundle I gave to a friend. I think they will still be OK to plant so I will probably just stick them in the ground here and there because the planned beds are all filled. We are having several days of misty or light rain and had a little sleet mixed in today. I looked longingly at that 80 degrees in the SW part of the state today. We are at 35 right now with a wind chill of 28, so there is no planting going on here.

Lisa, since I spent 8 years of my life in Alaska, I have no difficulty remembering that summer days are longer in the north. Of course, that is only in the summer, and in the winter you have many more hours of darkness. I've also lived in Ohio and Michigan.

I went to a little class once that was taught by a lady that had a degree in horticulture. She made it a point to say that you used sets (bulbs) for green onions and plants for bulbing onions. She said that it seemed like it should be the other way around, and she didn't know why you had to use plants to grow bulbing onions. Of course, my inquiring mind had to know why. LOL

This is the way I keep it straight in my mind. We are told that an onion plant that is larger than a pencil when planted in it's dormant state is much more likely to bolt as it grows. The reason appears to be that they were large enough when they were pulled that they grow as if they are in their second year. Since an onion is a biennial plant, it grows in year one and goes to seed in year two. If it is small, then it just goes dormant, and resumes growth when it is planted again, and hopefully it is planted within 3 weeks.

A set grows (larger than a pencil) to produce that set, and is then dried and stored until planted. It grows fine through the green onion stage, but is likely to bolt rather than bulb because it thinks it is in it's second year.

My Walmart still had onion plants last week that looked just fine. They were Bonnie plants. Atwood's usually carries Dixondale, but the bundle always look smaller to me than what we get when we order direct.

Some years we complain about the cost of Dixondale onions, but when you deduct the $7 shipping charge off of the top, then the price is only $4 for the first bunch and less as the quantity increases. The bunch is huge and always in good shape. We pay shipping on almost everything we order, but we don't normally see the shipping charge until the end of the order. Dixondale just adds it at the top because they have to use some type of priority shipping on small orders as well as large orders.

I think Dixondale charges a fair price for the quality they supply. The majority of my plants this year are Candy, but I ordered 2 intermediate samples just to have a few purples for making Habanero Gold Jam. I grew one long day type last year just to see how they would do. They grew fine but made about the same size bulb as Candy, and had to stay in the ground much longer. Since my garden space is limited, and I can grow another crop behind the intermediate types, I chose not to plant a long day this year. Since I am at the very, very top of the short day area, I don't try to grow those.

I read this about their shipping:

"Carrizo Springs, Texas has an ideal climate for growing onions, but unfortunately, we're a fair distance from many of our customers. Because delivery times affect quality, it's important that your onions are delivered as quickly as possible. To expedite your orders, our refrigerated trucks leave our packing house on Saturdays and Sundays and deliver to UPS hubs on Monday morning, keeping the total transit time at 2-4 days.

All our product prices include shipping as a matter of course, so that you can be aware of the actual cost of your purchase. Unfortunately, we've seen an unprecedented increase in shipping rates in the past year. The rising cost of fuel has had a ripple effect on our costs, and freight costs have skyrocketed."

Oh, duh, Soonergrandmom....I'm so silly! I really probably shouldn't open my mouth before noon and the brain starts to kick in. I should have thought of Alaska and the famous long days. (eyerolling at myself). :)

Lisa

Jill,

You're welcome. I find it promising that you have a sweet variety. Maybe that means they'll be the right type for our climate (the short day and intermediate day types tend to be sweet onions while many of the long-day types are not the supersweet types we grow here in the south)....and you have nothing to lose by trying.

Experimenting and trying different varieties, different soil improvement methods, different techniques, etc., is what turns a non-gardener into a gardener and what turns any gardener into a more experienced gardener. I think of my garden as a living laboratory and I think of the many different things I try as "experiments". That is how you learn: from each year's experiments, you learn what will work for you in the soil you have with the weather you have in that year and season. Then, another year will have completely different weather and you'll learn more. Scottokieman's post illustrates that perfectly. My best gardening years here have been the mostly mild and very wet years of 2004 and 2007 and some types of plants grew and produced better in those years than they ever have again. For example, in 2004 I got enough rhubarb to put up a bunch of it in the freezer. In general, I cannot keep rhubarb alive here through the heat of the summer, but that year it was unstoppable.

Larry, I noticed that as well with the 6-packs and 9-packs the last 2 years. Down here they have been arriving very early in the stores, and once they sell out, there are no more 6-packs and 9-packs, at least of veggies. Of course not. They want for a person to have to spend $3 or $4 to buy 1 plant (sometimes there's more than one plant in the pot, though maybe not intentionally) in a peat pot.

With flowers, it seems like the 6-packs and 9-packs sell out almost as fast and then are replaced with larger containers. Some of the stores near us now have 6-packs only in March or earliest April. After that the containers get bigger and bigger as time goes by (and more expensive too, of course).

A couple of weeks ago I was in Denton at a big box store and they had almost all their 6-packs of flowers for 50% off and a selected few were 90% off. I assumed that they were clearing out six-packs to make room for a big load of plants in larger containers for the upcoming weekend. It was crazy. People were buying as many flats of flowers as their vehicles would hold...filling up the trunks, and if they were alone in their vehicle, they were putting plastic on the back seat to protect it and were putting flats of flowers there. It was crazy, crazy, crazy. I wasn't even looking for flowers, really, that day, but I couldn't resist 50% off, so bought 7 flats of six packs. With the 50% discount, each flat was $4 and some change. I planted the cool-season flowers immediately, but the warm-season ones are in the greenhouse waiting for warmer weather. I bet that by the weekend all those 6-packs were gone (I was there on a Monday and it wouldn't surprise me if they all were gone by the end of the day) and had been replaced by more expensive annual flowers in 3 or 4" pots, quarts, etc. At the time, I thought it was crazy---Denton's average last frost date had not even arrived yet and they had warm-season flowers for sale at a serious clearance-type discount. It used to be that even in Fort Worth, which heats up earlier than southern OK, you could get six-packs of annual flowers even in early May, but times have changed.

Carol, Your March weather has been horrible. Ours will be pretty cold Saturday through Tuesday or Wednesday but we currently are not forecast to get any of the winter-type precipitation. We will be close to freezing on at least 2 or 3 nights so I may cover up some things out of an abundance of caution, though I don't really think I'll need to. I'm just always conscious of the fact that sometimes our overnight low goes much lower than forecast. At our house our overnight low was forecast to be 48 degrees last night/this morning, but instead it went to 42. So, if that happens next week when our forecast is for 32, we could hit the mid-20s. It is easier to cover up plants on a night like that than worry about what will happen if I don't.

I think we are seeing increased fuel costs, too, reflected in the prices of plants in nurseries and garden centers, as well in the prices of produce in the grocery store. It is just one more reason for us to grow as much of our own food as we can.

I love Dixondale, as everyone here undoubtedly knows. The quality of their plants is unsurpassed and I rarely have trouble with my Dixondale onions. When they do bolt, it is either because Carizo Springs had erratic weather while the plants were growing, or we had real erratic weather here after I planted. I always take the ones that are larger than the size of a pencil, by the way, (and some years there's quite a few of those and some years there's not) and plant them along the edge of a raised bed about 1" apart and use them as green onions before they can bolt.

Dawn