How to Grow Onions from Seed

have you ever struggled with growing onions not green onions those are pretty easy but bulb onions in this video i'm going to take you through six mistakes you might be making if you're getting a bunch of this and not so much of this hey i'm brian with next level gardening and if you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips tricks and support to help take your garden to the next level you're in the right place get started now by clicking subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss anything let's get growing i had very little luck actually growing bulb onions until a couple years ago now to be fair i didn't really start trying to grow onions until about four to five years ago but there were some pretty common mistakes that i was making my biggest mistake was growing the wrong type of onion for my area i didn't realize that onions were photo thermoperiodic which means they are very sensitive to day length and daylight hours an onion is stimulated into stopping the production of the green leaves and starting the production of the bulb as the days start to lengthen between spring and summer certain onions need a specific amount of daylight hours for a specific number of days in order to bulb up very simply put the closer you are to the equator the shorter your summer days are and the further you are from the equator the longer your summer days are in the u.s it's broken down like this map the northern part of the united states you grow long day onions the middle section you're going to grow intermediate day onions and in the southern section we grow short day onions now for some reason when i started out i was confused that well we have warm winters and nice summers so it's probably a long day it's actually the complete opposite so when you're buying seeds for onions or sets we'll get into that in a second make sure that they are short day intermediate or long day depending on where you're located because if you get the wrong type all you're going to get is green leaves the second mistake is sowing the seeds in the wrong season in my climate which has very mild winters we sow our seeds in november so if you're in a southern climate like me and you haven't yet sowed your seeds it's too late for this year but stick around because i do have some information that you're going to want to know in colder winter climates you sow your seeds in the spring as soon as the ground can be worked so for some of you it's too late for some of you it's right on time so a few years ago i was sowing my seeds in spring and not understanding why i got a prize winning harvest like this that brings me to my next mistake sowing seeds in the right season but sowing them too late in most climates we're there right now it's it's most likely too late unless you're just coming out of really cold weather and the ground is not just now starting to be workable for those of you in intermediate to northern areas you can still plant sets or transplants an onion set is basically just a baby onion bulb the grower grew that from seed until it was just a little bulb pulled it stored it for the winter and sells it in the spring it gives you a bit of a jump start now day length still matters you still want to pay attention to that another thing that matters is size the smaller the better the larger the little onions set the sooner it's going to stop growing and try to go to flower i never had good luck with sets let me know in the comments if you grow from sets and do just fine or if you're like me and you're like what's going on a better choice at this time of year are transplants now transplants are basically just an onion seedling and you can buy the transplants at a nursery usually they are actually either bare root or just in tiny little trays i find that these grow much better than sets and give you the head start needed at this time of year you want to plant transplants where the white part is mostly under the soil and the green part is above the soil number four is not thinning if you're growing from seed onions need their space they need elbow room to be able to grow large bulbs now when you're seeding the seed is pretty small so it's kind of hard to space it perfectly so you're going to need to thin fortunately onions are very forgiving with thinning probably one of the most forgiving plants there are so thin your onions to about six inches apart if there's a bunch growing in one spot you're a little handy with the seed there you can dig up that whole clump tease them apart with your hands and fill in any blank spots that didn't germinate or move them to another area number five is too much nitrogen at the wrong time now onions are heavy feeders and they need nitrogen to grow a lot of green leaves and the more green leaves the bigger the bulb because when you think about it the bulb is actually just the layers of leaves that have swollen under the ground and so in the beginning you want to have a good amount of nitrogen to feed those leaves and to produce those leaves so the first couple of months of a plant's growth you want to feed the leaves every two weeks feed the plant with a good organic balanced fertilizer i use neptune's harvest tomato and veg but once you see the bulbs starting to develop you want to stop fertilizing continuing on with nitrogen fertilizer will actually cause the bulbs to split and you don't want that too much fertilizer can also cause bolting and while we're talking about bolting there are other things that cause it bolting is when an onion goes to flour too soon now these green onions i have growing here they have gone to flower but their last years they've actually produced for me for two years and i'm not worried about there's the bulbs coming from them i grew them for green onions so they actually have really cool flowers i'm gonna let them bloom and then just scatter some more green onion seeds and they'll be back in no time they also bolt from a stress response if there is a wild extreme from heat to cold that can make them bolt any bolting onion you can still eat the bulb doesn't affect it in any way but it's going to pretty much stop growing at that point so you can go ahead and pull it up and just enjoy whatever size bulb is on there and you can also eat the tops now while we're talking about fertilizer that brings us to number six not enough phosphorus for good root development plants need phosphorus and onions are phosphorus hungry now unfortunately as i've mentioned before phosphorus doesn't move through the soil very easily and so it needs to be placed below the seeds or the plant but in this case seeds transplants sets whatever um at planting time so i use neptune's harvest crab and lobster for that you can also use bone meal which gives a really nice big shot of phosphorus from the very get go so i hope these six tips help you turn this into this and become professional onion growers if you learned something from this video please give it a thumbs up really appreciate it click subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 152,155

Keywords: how to grow onions, growing onions, planting onions, how to, how to grow onions from seed, spring onions, planting onions from seed, california garden tv, next level gardening, how to plant onions, planting onion sets

Id: _yzzxEaliLo

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021