All About Onions

Of all the plants we are hoping to grow this year, onions have to be started the earliest and they became the first seeds sown for the 2021 OCHM Garden.

We decided to grow onions because they were one of the earliest introduced crops to our area, first arriving here in the 1630s. By 1686 colonists were so good at growing onions in this region that they were exporting ships loaded with onions as far as Newfoundland and Barbados.

The type that grows best in our climate here is the northern United States are called long-day onions. This means that the onions will form bulbs when the days are long and have 14 or 15 hours of sunlight.  If daylight never makes it to 14 hours, this type of onion would never form a bulb and you’d only get the green leaves above ground. But this isn’t a problem in our growing area.

Our particular variety is the Yellow Sweet Spanish onion, which can be started indoors or directly sown outside. We have so much going on that we took advantage of this early start and sowed them in the second week of February, or about 12 weeks before our projected last frost. It may have been a bit early, but we have so many other things planned that we wanted to give the onions our full attention at the start.  Onions also can handle a little bit of cold, so they won’t have to stay inside all the way until May.

We planted our onions on February 13, 2021, and recorded how it went.

February 20th

After one week the sprouts began to emerge. You can see how onion sprouts appear bent over when they first germinate.

March 6th

The seedlings have straightened up. And they are now 3 or 4 inches tall!

March 13th

After only one more week the seedlings are getting pretty tall. To encourage stronger plants as they grow, they got a haircut back down to about 1 1/2- 2 inches right after this picture was taken. The green tops are totally edible, and you can use them like chives in your cooking. These plants may get another haircut while they stay inside growing for about another month. Around mid-April, when the ground is workable, they will head outside into the garden and we will look to harvest in mid-late summer.

March 27th

It’s late March and our onions are looking good. We noticed some roots starting to come through the bottom of their cells, and sure enough, there is a nicely formed root system on these seedlings. So, on a beautiful warm spring day, they were “potted up” into larger containers where they will stay for another two weeks or so until it’s planting time! 

April 15th

Our onions officially opened The OCHM Garden exhibit on April 15.  We transplanted 25 onion seedlings into one of our raised beds, amended with loam and compost, and just an extra touch of compost at the time of planting. You can check it out in our latest video.