That's great Larry. We have been picking ours when we need one but the tops are now falling so I may need to pull them for curing.

Mike

Your welcome Larry, glad you got some larger onions.

As we all know, sometimes onions cooperate. Mine are still green but next weeks heat will probably start turning the potatoes and onions.

Those onions are nice, Larry. This place is great isn't it. I would not be nearly as determined or successful without these people.
I did not remember about feeding the onions. I will do that. Its not too late is it? mine haven't really even bulbed up that much.
kim

Same here. Mine haven't bulbed yet.

I am thrilled, however, with some of my multipliers. Last year I grew Bonilla F1 shallot from seed. It showed promise. So I replanted all of the bulbs. They are looking WONDERFUL this year: going to produce a lot of bulbs. Plus, they are flowering and I expect they'll set seed.

Additionally, I have an heirloom multiplier, which I received from Ken Goodpasture in Wagner. He got his start from a couple selling them at a fair at Baker Creek. This little onion managed to hang in a mesh bag, in his shed, for TWO YEARS, and still sprout and grow. The bulbs are not large. But it appears prolific, and, HARDY. This onion is flowering at the same time as Bonilla. So.... I am very excited about growing some seed. The possible crosses could have great potential for finding multipliers suited for Oklahoma!

Needless to say, my Egyptian walking onions are going to town. This kind of onion is as close to a useful weed as one can get. We had chopped onion all winter due to this variety. I plan on doing a large patch of these in late summer. The longer I live in Oklahoma, the more fond I become of any food plant that grows like a week and is nearly indestructible.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Larry great onions. I didn't start or grow any this year. Last year convinced me of one thing. If I want large onions I need to plant for a fall onion instead of an early onion. I harvested the overall largest onions I have ever grown last Sept. A lot larger than the onions I harvested in June/July. I now know why the onion growers around here grow for fall onions. I like starting my own as that way you can grow varieties you can't find available commercially. Jay

Jay, do you think I can grow fall onions here south of Ft. Smith, and if so what kind would you suggest?

Thanks, Larry

Larry, Your onions look great! Listening to what Robert said about fertilizing onions paid off. You'll never go wrong if you follow his advice. He's a very accomplished gardener.

Robert, I think of onions as teenaged children. They know what they are supposed to do and they know when they are supposed to do it, but, just like defiant teenagers, they sometimes just choose to do things their own way at their own pace. I've always thought that when they misbehave and are slow to bulb up, it has more to do with the weather conditions they've experienced than with anything else.

George, Living here has given me great appreciation for plants that tolerate our weather conditions and even thrive in them. Even with ornamental plants, I've let the whiny, fussy ones that need coddling just go ahead and die, and have replaced them with hardier plants that want to grow here.

Jay, When you grow for fall, do you still have to worry about daylength or is it not as important in fall onions?

Kim, Onions have very specific needs. They need to be fed regularly at specific sizes. I'm going to link the Dixondale Farms online guide to fertilizing onions. They have other growing guides on their website too. The info in the linked document is incredibly specific, and addresses growing onions with synthetic fertilizers and with organic ones. It also shows you how to determine how much fertilizer to use per acre, for larger growers, and how much to use in smaller rows in home gardens.

Since we don't know when you planted your onions or how many leaves they have, we cannot answer your question about the value of fertilizing this late in the season. Maybe you can determine the answer by reading the info at the link. Feeding and heavily irrigating onions when they are approaching maturity is not recommended once they reach a certain age/size.

Even with the fertilization recommendations from Dixondale, your onion plants also need proper spacing and consistent moisture that adds up to about 21" or water between the time they are planted and the time the necks start falling over. With less moisture than that, they won't get as large as they otherwise would have. I don't water my onions heavily and definitely see smaller size in dry years, but they are tasty all the same.

People who grow their onions using the closer spacing recommended by Mel Bartholomew for square foot gardening or biointensive gardening (for example, using the spacing recommended by John Jeavons) usually won't get onions quite as large as a person who is growing their onions in single or double rows with wider spacing. That is not a criticism of using closer spacing.....just a fact of life. I generally use John Jeavons' recommended spacing, though, and even in a rough year with erratic spring weather, I still get some onions that are baseball to softball sized. I imagine if I used wider spacing and heavier fertilization, they all would be that size.

This year's crop is the most erratic onion crop I've ever grown. You'll have one onion sitting there the size of a baseball and then, right beside it, you'll have one the size of a ping pong ball....and they are the same variety so you'd think they would size up consistently, but this year they sure haven't. I blame the weather and the lack of rainfall during the first 10 weeks or so of their growth.

The two varieties that have sized up best for me this year are Candy and Texas Legend. I think that next year those will be the only two I grow. Well, I'll grow some sort of red onion but, with them, the variety doesn't matter so much because, genetically, the red short day and intermediate day types just don't have the potential to get huge in our climate. If you are far enough north that you can grow long day-length types, then there are some great red ones that get nice and big.

I try to cycle my onion planting. One year, I plant a huge amount and then freeze tons of them for future cooking, while keeping enough fresh ones to keep us in onions for at least 6 months. So, in a year like that, I freeze about a three-year supply. Thus, the next year I only need onions for fresh-cooking and to use in canning recipes so I plant a lot fewer onions.

My least favorite thing in the world might be chopping and slicing hundreds of onions to freeze. It used to be a really miserable experience (talk about tears!), but I started wearing safety goggles while working with large amounts of onions and they prevent the onion-induced tears. By freezing a three year supply, I only have those couple of days of onion misery once every 3 years. I freeze the chopped ones in 1/4 C. and 1/2 C. packages so they already are measured out for cooking.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Dixondale Farms Onion Fertilization Guide

Dawn I only know what I've been told and haven't researched it to see if it is actually fact. What I was told by some along the Arkansas Valley who do grow onions for both early and late harvest they say you can grow the same varieties it is just when you start them. I was told day length will trigger them whether it is increasing or decreasing. They said if a plant has I believe it was 6 leaves or more (I've slept since then) when the day length is right for that variety it will bulb and size will depend on the number of leaves on it at that time. The plants I started were pencil lead size or just bigger when I set them out in mid March to early April. The Dixondale transplants of the same varieties were much larger. The Dixondale transplants matured in late June if memory serves me correctly and my transplants in late August to mid Sept. The late transplants had many more leaves when they bulbed and thus lot larger bulbs. I plan to grow onions again next year. I plan to start seeds at two different times so will know more after that. To this point I'm relying on what I've been told. I know the Candy onions I planted from my transplants last year didn't mature till late August. So I assume there must be something to what I've been told. Jay

Dawn, when freezing onions, do you cure them first, and do you blanch them?

In reading the link you posted I found I was still very low on what fertilizer I should have applied.

Larry

Jay,

Well, if those growers told you that you can use the same varieties, why would we not believe them? Obviously they know what they are doing since they earn a living doing it. I find it interesting that plants started later will mature a couple of months later. So, clearly it isn't daylength alone that triggers bulbing, but daylength plus the number of leaves. That is food for thought.

I've never grown fall onions but maybe I'll try it one of these years....just not in a year in which I already grew 6 bunches of onions in spring. We're kind of overloaded with onions this year, but I'm not complaining. We like onions and eat a lot of them.

Dawn

I bought liquid concentrate fertilizer for mine and never found a time when I wanted to add more water to my beds, so mine haven't been fed at all. I don't have any big onions yet but they appear to be doing OK, just late.

I have onions in several different beds and the ones in the raised bed are acting strangely. They are still growing, but have fallen over. Not the 'I'm mature", falling over, but more like corn that has lodged. Maybe the soil in that bed was just too soft to support them with some of the winds we had. The ones in the ground beds haven't done this.

Larry,

I usually cure them first, but I don't think that you have to cure them before freezing them. It is just that I never have enough time, so they are cured before I get around to spending a day in the kitchen chopping and slicing.

I don't blanch onions before freezing, even though the NCHFP says that you should blanch them for 3-7 minutes. Of course, their texture changes after they are frozen, but I am using them in cooking anyway, so their texture would change with being cooked.

I prepackage them in small zip-lock bags, using either the snack size ziplocks or sandwich size ziplocks. Then I put a bunch of the smaller ziplock bags into a 1-gallon freezer bag. I put all the little packages of chopped onions together in one1-gallon bag and all the sliced onions together in another ziplock bag. I store the two different types of frozen onions on separate shelves in the deep freeze so I know which big bag to grab when I need to remove a small bag or two for cooking. I have frozen onions for years and find they taste just fine even after 3 years in the freezer.

Carol, I have had a few onions lodge that way too. I think it is the rain making the soil so soft and the wind with all the storms. I straightened them back up because, unlike lodged corn, they wouldn't straighten themselves back up. I've had a few onions lodge during very strong thunderstorms in previous years but never as many as have done it this year.

Dawn

Thank you for the fertilizer link and for the tips on freezing them. That is what I will be doing next week with my gift onions.
kim