Complete Guide To GROWING ONIONS From Seed [BETTER Than Onion Sets]

what's going on gardeners it's saturday january 15th and it is time to start our onion seeds here on the southeastern coast of north carolina and today i'm going to show you a complete guide on how to grow onions from seed and explain to you why i believe growing onions from seed is the best way to grow onions for the most success every season if you're new to the channel please consider subscribing and hitting the bell to receive new video notifications and check out our amazon storefront and spreadshop in the video description for a list of the gardening products i use an awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated onions are biennials which means that they go through a two-year life cycle the very first year when planted from seed they will grow as a green tall blade of grass eventually thicken up and then they will grow a bulb and that onion bulb is what we're used to eating we harvest our onions midway towards the end of the first season if you do not harvest your onions as a bulb they will continue to mature the stalk will get thicker and then it will flower and go to seed that second season and it will reseed itself and then you will have multiple onions growing everywhere throughout your garden where it reseeded when it comes to growing onions you can grow them either as onion sets or you can grow them from seed now what an onion set is is you start a whole bunch of onions from seed they grow through the grass phase and then they start to form that bulb and then once that bulb reaches about one inch in diameter you pull that bulb you cut the green stalk and then you store that in a cool dry place and then those bulbs will go dormant those bulbs are then shipped to stores all over the country and then you buy those bulbs then you will plant those bulbs in the ground and then those bulbs will start to root and in theory you will get a jump start on the season because you don't have to wait for them to germinate and grow from seed as a tall blade of grass they'll already start as a bulb and that works great when everything aligns but there is a problem with this method in order for this method to be successful the bulb has to pick up where it left off it has to grow roots and then recognize that it's still in its first year of growth and it needs to continue to expand and grow that bulb into a nice large diameter for harvest several months later however sometimes there is a problem sometimes when you dig up those onion sets the onions get confused as to what time of the year it is because you break their growing pattern so what can happen when you grow your onions from sets are it will grow roots it will establish but it won't put a lot of energy into the bulbing process it will instead think that a whole year went by and it will want to move into the seed stalks reseeding flowering and reseeding phase so sometimes when you grow onions from onion sets you get really poor bulbs or they won't really bulb well at all so you run that risk when you grow them from sets and it's for that reason that i don't particularly like growing onion sets when you grow your onions from seed you never get that confusion where it doesn't know what time of the year it is you will always get good bulbing and i've performed this experiment side by side in a video that i will link to above and what i got was amazing nice big bulbs from all of the onions that i grew from seed and hit or miss bulbs from the onions grown from sets for that reason i don't grow onion sets anymore they cost a lot more money they don't save you all that much time and you get that anticipated potential failure rate or inadequate balding when you grow from seed you can do it at a fraction of the cost and you get great results every single time you just have to remember to start earlier to make up the difference because you're not starting with that one-inch diameter bulb so now that i explain to you why i grow my onions from seed i want to show you how to go about doing this now when it comes to starting your onions from seed there's a debate should i direct sow the seeds into the ground or should i start them in small seed starting trays and my opinion for this is you definitely want to go with the seed starting tray route and that is because onions are very very tiny seeds only about the size of a poppy seed and you have to plant them very shallow so if you get heavy rains the seeds can wash away and if any other weeds germinate alongside your onions they will out compete the onions and you will get really poor germination and the weeds will suffocate them out i recommend starting your onion seeds as transplants in seed cells in a controlled environment so you have no weed pressure and you don't have to worry about heavy rains potentially washing them away so my favorite tool to do this are these 72 cell seed starting trays that you can pick up at your local big box store but if you can't find these i have the jiffy 72 cell packs that are very very very cheap and basically exactly the same carbon copies of these in my amazon storefront linked in the video description under seed starting supplies then on the right i have a basic seed starting mix that is nothing more than a bag of generic potting mix that i bought from lowe's and then i added some more vermiculite to to make it lighter and a little more loamy with more moisture retention so it's nothing special there you can just use any decent quality potting mix or you could add more perlite or vermiculite if you'd prefer the next step of this process is making sure that you pick the right onions for your area now in that complete guide to growing onions that i link to above and i will link to again i go over the whole methodology behind picking onions and how it works onions bulb based on the length of your day around the solstice so when you live up north when days are very long around the solstice you have to grow a long day onion variety if you live in the mid latitudes you need to grow an intermediate day and if you live in the south like i live you need to grow a short day onion if you try growing a long day onion down south the days never get long enough in may and june to trigger the appropriate bulbing so you have to pair onion varieties appropriate to your latitude and the length of your days in the heart of the summer now looking here you'll see that i have a short day and an intermediate day onion i know that this yellow granex which is the classic georgia vidalia onion grows fantastic here with absolutely delicious flavor and that is because i'm on the northern edge of the short day variety growing zones however it's kind of hard to find short day red onions i found this intermediate day onion and i think it will do well here because if i go one more state up i'm in the intermediate day region so it's not i think i'll be able to get away with growing this i'm going to take that gamble then i also have this shallot i have tried growing shallots from sets for the past two seasons and it has always been a failure they have never bulbed properly for me i always get lousy results so i'm going to nip that problem in the bud and i'm going to start growing my shallots from seed and i will likely have tremendously more success then i'm going to try to grow these really cool scarlet banded bunching onions i've never grown bunching onions before but i want to give it a try so now that we went over why i'm choosing these specific varieties let's show you how to go ahead and plant them so now we fill both of the seed trays with the potting mix and we also wetted it down to make sure that it began absorbing water we want to pre-moisten and since i'm growing four different types of onions i cut them basically in half so i have four quarters total and in one quarter here i have yellow one will be the red onion the next will be the shallot and the next will be the bunching onion so you can set yourself up so it's really easy and you don't have to label each individual row or each individual tray when it comes to planting onion seeds you want to plant multiple onion seeds per individual seed tray this is called over seeding and that's because onion seeds don't have a great germination rate you want to make sure that you have several in each tray onion seeds are very small and they're hard to see so i'm actually going to pour them out into this tray right here because they're into this cup right here because they're only about the size of poppy seeds and it will be easier to pick about four or five of them up in my finger and then put four or five seeds in each individual tray if you just try to pour them out of the onion seed packet you will probably pour way too many in there and what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to thin them as they grow so i'm eventually going to thin each individual cell into one onion but i want to try to get multiple of them to germinate you do not have to bury onion seeds very deeply at all in fact you can really just sprinkle it on top of your seed trays and then just swish them around lightly with the tip of your finger to try to get them covered a little bit and then you can just sprinkle a little bit more vermiculite on top to lock in that moisture so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab about four onion seeds four to five onion seeds in the tip of my finger and i'm just going to sprinkle them in each individual seed tray like that and then i'm going to take my finger and i'm just going to lightly move them around and then at the end you can sprinkle a little bit more vermiculite on top if you want to be sure that you have complete coverage of the onion seeds so i'm going to do exactly what i did there for each individual tray four to six seeds have been placed in every single one of these individual seed trays now i'm going to take some vermiculite and you can just use the plain old potting mix that you started with and just lightly sprinkle it on top to make sure that all of your onion seeds are properly covered then just take it outside and lightly hose down the tops of the seed trays just to make sure that everything gets evenly moist now that the seed trays have been watered in and they're properly moistened we have to wait for the onion seeds to germinate and the perfect place to do this is indoors right in front of a sunny patio window so they get a little bit of sunshine throughout the day but they don't get blasted and they're not too hot you'll also notice that i don't have these sitting on the seedling heat mat right in front of them that is because onions are closer to cool season plants you plant them during the winter they don't need a seedling heat mat to germinate like warm weather plants like tomatoes cucumbers and peppers do so a vinyl or tile kitchen floor is the perfect temperature in order for the onions to germinate your job will be to check on them on a daily basis to make sure that the seed trays never dry out completely and if you choose to use the humidity domes on the 72 cell trays you want to open them every single day to let in some fresh air doing this you can expect germination in approximately 7 to 14 days it's sunday january 30th and our seed grown onions are doing absolutely fantastic now that most of them have germinated and they're getting to be a pretty nice height it's time that we start thinning the onion seedlings it is our end goal to reduce every single one of these seed trays into one single onion we don't want multiple onions in there however i don't want to pick them all out the first go-around i want to do this in two different ways and that's because these young onions are still at risk for dying back so if i were to thin every single one of them down to one onion now and then one of them decides to die back or damp off i'm going to lose everything in that seed tray so what i'm going to do is this very first time i'm going to thin them all down to two or three onions per seed tray and then in a second thinning period probably a week from now i'll reduce them to the final onion now to do this is very simple you basically have two options you could either manually pull out each of the blades of grass that you don't want or you can go get a pair of scissors and you can snip them at this stage it should be fine to manually pull them out because the root system is very small but if they were much larger than this you may just want to cut them down with scissors because if the roots become intertwined you can wind up ripping them all out so all i'm going to do right here i'm just going to pull this little onion blade out one and let's pull this little onion blade out two and i'll leave these two of the strongest seedlings and then i will thin this down to a single seedling in a week i'll pull off this little seedling there i'll leave two in there and then oh it looks like these are kind of wrapped up a little bit so i'll pull this one out this one looks like it has really poor rooting we'll pull that out and then i will see if i could gently pull this out right there thin that down to two and you'll just want to do that for every single one of these seed trays and then like i said in another week you'll thin them all down to a single seedling then once the onion seedlings become strong enough that they have a root mass that fills out each of the individual cells in the tray so they can be easily popped out and maintain that root ball they can be transplanted out into the garden for the final planting for me that will probably be sometime in mid to late february maybe very early march if we have poor weather and they develop slowly so everybody i sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button ring the notification bell and subscribe to the channel so you're notified when we release more videos like these if you're curious about any of the products i use in my garden they are all linked down below in the amazon storefront link in the video description while you're there check out my spreadshop link for custom made merch if you want to support the channel thank you all again so much for watching and i hope to see all of you again on the next video well the cheese grater is out so that must mean that dale is waiting patiently on his bed for some cheese let's see how my aim is today with a little bit of cheese you ready bud come on up nope no on your bed on your on your bed you stinker ready oh nice catch dale it was very good good job buddy good job

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 190,995

Keywords: growing onions, growing onions from seed, how to grow onions, how to grow onions from seed, growing onion sets, growing onion bulbs, onion plants, onion transplants, transplanting onions, onion seedlings, onion tips, seed grown onions, grow onions, onion seeds, onion seed, onion bulbs, onion sets, onions, onion, bunching onions, shallots, onion varieties, garden, gardening, gardening tips, garden tips, vegetable gardening, organic gardening, how to, millennial gardener

Id: 1gKvOx5R39A

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022