3 Ways to Plant Onions! Beginners Guide! 🌿// Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going today i want to talk about three different methods of growing onions and there are a few other things i want to cover as well like the pros and cons of each one of those methods we'll also be talking about how to choose the best variety for your area how and when to be planting each one of these types of onion some best practices in terms of fertilizing and watering and then we will finish up with a few harvest tips so let's run through the three methods we've got planting onions by seed by sets which look like little bulbs and by young plants also called transplants or starts let's talk about planting from seed first the obvious pros here are that this method is always the least expensive option because usually you get quite a number of seeds in a seed packet for a couple of dollars depending on the variety that you choose and you have access to many more varieties than you would if you're choosing plants or sets so if you're a type who likes to try out different things not just run-of-the-mill varieties that you can always get your hands on this is a really good way to do it the cons of seed is that it just takes a longer growing season we can usually in our area we have a very long growing season if we plant seeds straight in the ground early in the spring they have enough time typically to form a big bulb but if you don't get started like we're getting toward the first of may if i put these seeds in the ground they may not have a chance to get all the way like to their full potential of size which is okay too you mean you just harvest them when they're a little bit younger and not quite as big you also have the option with c to start them earlier inside like you would with tomatoes and peppers in packs like this and grow them onto this side but a con might be that that takes a little bit of extra time it takes up space in your house you may not mind that though the second method is by set or little bulbs like this now i think the pros of this type is that it's easy they're easy to handle they're easy to see when you're putting them down in your little trench in your garden so for a beginner having something tangible like that might be a really nice benefit the cons of sets is that you typically don't get as big of a bulb i've never been able to get as big of a bulb with sets as i can with seed or with plants that may not matter to you at all you also usually don't know the variety that you have they usually are just sold by yellow red or white so if you like to know what variety you have or have more information on that you may not be able to get that with sets last one is by plants which is typically how i like to plant mine in the garden because one i did not grow these on myself i didn't have to take the space or the time and the care to get them to this stage i bought them like this usually for a couple dollars you can get a two pack four pack or maybe even a six pack of onions that somebody else has grown for you and usually in your immediate area they'll be selling onions that are appropriate for your area so you know that when you buy them and put them in the ground they're going to do really well like these are a red onion i usually plant a lot of walla wallas i've got 120 of those planted in our garden that i started from plants i still feel like they're a good value because like in this two pack right here i paid under two dollars and there are 12 onions in here and i feel like that's a good value sometimes you can get four packs of walla walla as i planted earlier there was 11 starts in each cell and they were four packs so is that 44 onions for two bucks that's amazing sometimes they don't stretch as far though if they're a little bit bigger like this and haven't been seeded as heavy so that could be a potential con if they don't have as many plants now i want to talk about how to choose the best variety of onion for your area and if you are a beginner i would recommend that you go down and check out your local garden center go to a reputable one they should be selling varieties of things that are suitable for your area because they want gardeners that are buying things from them to be successful so they will carry varieties that do well for you and that might take some of the guesswork out for you you can also do a quick google search on the variety of onion that you're interested in to find out some information because there are three categories of onions there are long day short day and day neutral onions so temperature and day length is what triggers onions to start bulbing they tend to grow greens when it's cool outside and they start to bulb up when it's warm outside so a long day variety of onion needs 14 to 16 hours of sunlight in order to form their nice big bulbs and that happens in northern climates or zone five and colder where we have very long days um so they work great for us we live in a zone six now technically um so we do long day onions now short day onions are for those of you who are growing in more southern climates usually more zone seven or warmer where you have mild winters and typically you're planting late fall early winter you're kind of growing them on and tending to them through those months and then once the daylight increases to 12 hours they start that's what triggers them and to start bulbing up and growing bigger and then there are day neutral onions that fall somewhere right in between they are a type that you can grow in either region usually they grow best like in zones five through seven okay to plant onion seeds it's a very easy thing to do the best source of information you are ever gonna get will be on the back of the seed packets because sometimes there's specific things for specific varieties that you need to know and that will be included on the back so it'll always tell you like planting depth uh how far to space them what kind of light of course they need how many weeks to start them inside how many weeks before your last frost if that's something that you're interested in doing and so forth so typically you want to wait until after the danger of a really hard frost to plant these for us that means we can plant them anywhere from the end of march to the end of april we might get near freezing or right at freezing but we never have a very hard frost after that point so you just have to keep that in mind and it's good to get them planted out early so that they have plenty of time to grow and mature so for like this variety is a sweet spanish utah yellow you would plant them about a half inch deep and you can plant them a lot of people do this kind of thickly in the row and then when they come up you can let them all start growing up and kind of forming green onions and then you can start harvesting those green onions out but leave some every about four to six inches and it depends like this variety you would thin to three inches so it does depend on how big your onion bulb wants to get and that will be based on what variety you choose so thin out everything in between and you can use all of those as green onions and salads and dinners and things like that throughout the spring months and then you still have those onions left every three inches that you can let bulb up through the rest of the summer now if you live in a colder zone where your season season is pretty short it might be a good idea to start your seed inside in packs like this and you can do that six anywhere from four to eight weeks i would think before the last hard frost you get them up looking nice like this and then they've got a head start when you get them outside to plant them and for those of you gardening in southern climates now i don't have a lot of information on that because i garden in a northern climate so for those of you who do and if you have any extra information please leave it in the comment section below but typically you're starting your onions in late fall early winter so just keep that in mind so now i want to demonstrate how to plant the sets and the plants so i'm going to flip both of my pots over get some soil in them and then we'll do that okay since i'm getting my soil out i'm using an organic potting mix for this keep in mind that any kind of crop that's growing underneath the soil it needs elbow room it needs something nice and fluffy to grow in like potatoes beets carrots all of those things onions they want a nice lofty kind of fluffy mix so i'm going to use the potting mix with a little bit of compost mixed in and i've got the land and sea both of these are organic so we'll have a really nice rich soil they're heavy feeders all alliums are in these containers so they should do really well now if you're gardening in the ground or raised beds you'll still want to add in some compost some organic material in there and some starter fertilizer when you're prepping your soil and getting it nice and broken up and ready for your onions because that'll give them the best start possible all right broken up all of the big chunks and now i'm going to add in a couple inch layer of the compost and i'll mix it all together with my hands oh that'll do it right there oh this is like prime onion the planting they're gonna love love this onions are also fairly shallow rooted plants so you wouldn't even need containers this big and i'm just using used plastic tree containers that we had hanging around because i've already got my raised beds filled with onions but these are great because i feel like in our area it gets so hot that they need a little bit of extra soil just to help with moisture control and keeping the onions cool it is just very helpful so i just don't have to mix the biotone very deep into the soil it doesn't have to be all the way throughout just in this nice top layer of soil this like to me like i would want to be planted in this if i was an onion this is this would be my jam right here it doesn't even matter it's a plastic pot [Applause] so so let's start with sets first i've got some nice yellow sets here typically you don't want to oops well you don't want to plant anything that's too big you usually want to look for sets that are about the size like half inch maybe a little bit bigger nothing like super super small because they won't produce very good ones the big ones might be a little bit quicker to bolt but you want to set these about every four inches and we'll plant them about an inch deep and i'm going to just push them down into the soil so i want to set them out first so i know where they're all at and now this container is actually planting more than i thought it was going to which is great and you can use really whatever you want in terms of a container and we're going to plant it with the pointy side facing up that's where the green onion will start coming up and then this is the rooting end right there you can kind of see the little dry roots right there so we'll just push it down an inch sometimes you can go a couple inches if it's a little bit bigger set but we want these to have plenty of room to bulb up and then we just water them in it's a really easy thing now i did not run drip to these containers because these are not permanent containers in my garden they're just going to hang out here by the greenhouse and we hose water everything out here anyway and most of the time onions want about an inch of water per week to stay nice and productive and healthy because they are so shallow rooted and so keep that in mind especially in containers because they whatever they receive they have to receive from you or for this from the sky and in our area we don't get much rain so um they're going to be really dependent on me so for onions this used to be a total mystery to me i would see these pack onions and i would think like how in the world do you do you plant these like all in one chunk let me show you what you do you take them out of the pack and then you just gently start knocking soil off and we're gonna pull them all apart where they're all separate it's a usually fairly easy thing to do i'm just going to gently tug see that oh that's a beauty right there look at those roots okay i'm just going to continue doing that until i've got them all apart i've actually had my walla walla onions planted outside for several weeks now probably three weeks so we really are able to plant ours fairly early i think so that's been mid-march is when i put mine out and they might look a little floppy right in the beginning a little bit sad but they'll pick up once they've rooted into their spot and they'll start growing and looking great so we're just going to plant these to where the bulb part is about an inch or so maybe up to two inches under the soil we can give them plenty of room to bulb out as well and it with your sets and with your plants you can also plant them closer together if you want and just harvest out the young onions a little bit earlier and use those up and let the other ones bulb up bigger i think that might work perfect that's three six nine ten in here i've got two left what should i do i'll find a little spot for them we'll harvest these out a little bit early okay firm all the soil around all of these so the planting process is done and it's really not that complicated it's easy to do so let's move on to some best practices i already talked about soil type they like it light and fluffy and rich because they are heavy feeders so if you're prepping a spot in the ground or in a raised bed make sure to turn that soil over with a garden fork break up any large pieces incorporate some compost and some starter fertilizer at that point and the onions will really thank you for it and they will perform better and then keep in mind about a month or a month and a half after you're done planting you'll want to go in and maybe side dress with another application of fertilizer at that point i'm going to be using garden tone you can also do another layer of compost a side dress of compost if you want to do that instead and for watering they are shallow rooted like i mentioned before so they will want consistent moisture especially if you're using containers like these these will be watered every single day because containers want to dry out a lot quicker in the summer time when they're starting to form their bulbs that's when it's the most important to keep consistent moisture to them because if they dry out too much they have a tendency to split so just keep your eyes open when they start to form a nice big bulb keep the water going to them in my raised bed situation i have drip going to every single bed that we run every single day and they're not getting an enormously deep soak but they're getting the perfect amount to keep them happy and i tend to have really good onion crops and i'm not saying that you need to go water your onions every day just make sure that they dry out they don't dry out between waterings too much and it's just gonna vary wildly depending on what kind of soil you have and if you're receiving rain and all those sorts of things and the transplants will need a little bit more water initially than your sets but once they're both actively growing and you're kind of right in the middle of your growing season they'll be needing about the same amount of water now when you notice the onion top starting to soften so they look like nice big bulbs in the ground and the tops are going to soften and start to fall over like they're about ready to be harvested that's when you can back off on the water and you can let them mature a little bit in a more dry maybe a little bit less fertile soil now you can to keep weeds down around the onions you can add a one to two inch layer of mulch once they are up and growing you don't want to get it too close to the tops of the bulbs you want to leave those exposed but it does help discourage weeds in between them if you add that in and it helps to keep a little bit more moisture in the soil all right so the last thing is about harvesting we have done videos about this before that we will link down before but you'll notice that right above the top of your onion bulb like right here you'll see your onion bulb forming and your tops will be much bigger and thicker than this but it'll start to get really soft and it'll start flopping over and the tops will have already started to yellow a little bit that's when you know that the onions are ready to harvest so you can pull them out knock any excess soil that's around the root ball and around the bulb off you don't have to clean them off completely and then you want to cure them for about seven days is what i do i put them behind our barn on a pallet that's open air so they're getting lots of good air circulation and they're not in the direct sun some people sun cure theirs and i haven't done that with mine but they stay outside for seven days and then they move into our barn into a little bit cooler more shaded area to dry out and cure completely when they're done curing which i usually leave them in the barn for about two to three weeks i'll go in cut the tops off cut the roots off and i'll put them in a basket it's like a slotted basket so there's still a lot of air flow and then we put them down in our basement which is cool it's not it doesn't even get near freezing you don't want them to be anywhere near freezing but you can have them close to that and they store a lot better and longer when they're in cooler temperatures where the humidity is a little bit higher if you don't have an area like that like underneath a stairwell or in the coolest room of your house um something like that in an area like that they'll do the best and store the longest and that is it for growing onions for today i hope this video was helpful for you guys i'm excited to see what these do this year i actually don't have any red onions planted in our garden and this is about how many red onions i use in a year so it's about perfect anyway thanks guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video bye [Music] you

Channel: Garden Answer

Views: 247,214

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: J9gOp4kGD2Q

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020