How To Grow Onions & Harvest Onions

good morning last week we put our sweet onion seedlings in the ground gotten started and asking yourself well what do I do now okay that's exactly what we're going to do in this video is take you step by step through the process of after the onions are planted the maintenance and care that's required after you get them growing and then actually harvesting the onion last week we planted our seedlings and if you can tell on the tips you'll see the tips start to die back a little bit and a lot of people get scared thinking the onions are dying that's okay they're going to die less a little bit those things are devoting all their energy into root growth right now and you'll see those things emerge with new growth on the top of these onions and they're just as happy as they can be you Oh okay you remember when we planted our onions I separated out the big uns from the lint ones and I put the big ones over in a perimeter bed so they can grow up to make some beautiful onion bulbs then I took the little ones and I said I was going to plant them in a separate area so I can make little green onions and salad onions out of those and I've done that with our containers but as you can see I put these in there for weeks old and they're coming along beautifully and I put just enough in here so when I want to make a letter of a salad I just come out here and I grabbed the whole bunch that's like a bunch you get out of grocery store lettuce container not lettuce with our container onions are coming along really nice all right this is where we put the big onions however letting them grow up to be beautiful bulb onions they've been in there for four weeks and you can take a look out and you can see that they've grown if you look all the way down the road you can see how beautiful that template helps you to create even organized rows so they'll be easy to maintain here in very near future good morning it's been eight weeks since we put the onions in and we've had a volatile spring we've had 35 mile an hour winds for three weeks in a row 25 to 35 miles an hour and our onion tops were about 2 feet tall in some cases even 30 inches and they were beautiful but the wind has just completely wreaked havoc out here and it's broke them all off and tangled them up and it was really pretty bad and it probably would have been alright if I left on but I just wanted to straighten them out and clean them up and get a big better start because I still have plenty of time left on these onions so what I did was I cut the tops and out about 10 inches above them at the ground and will let these onions start over there in the ground growing great bulbs so the tops they can just start over and in two weeks those tops will be right basically back where they were so it doesn't hurt them a bit I normally don't even do this step but since they were so just damaged from the terrible winds I went ahead and did it this year so let me show you how I I trimmed these tops whenever I have something like that happened I come up to the onion and I come about ten inches above the top and I just pull a bunch together simply snip them off all right the next step is I sneak this out of the kitchen my Massey was at work I got a kitchen knife and I've been at 90 degrees at the end so I have about an inch and a half on the end and I ring in my onions remember when I planted them I put them in the hole I squeezed them in so that they would stand up good and straight till they got established well now they're established it's been eight weeks and that bowl was starting to swell and if I leave them packed like that all they do is make green onions the bulb doesn't develop so what I do is I ring in this onion bulb I pull it back and it will Italy even make the bolt in the onion kind of wiggling wobbling around but it's okay because those roots are a good seven or eight inches long right now so I ring it in expose that wall and let it grow and that moment increase huge in the next few weeks here's how I do it a real simple process I just come up to the ball see that bulb I don't know if you can see it let me try a couple of them here see the bulb come right around them see it and they see how it's wobbling that's okay it ain't gonna go nowhere I go down the row see the little bulb coming up I expose each one of them okay our onions been growing for ten weeks and you'll remember last week we had all that terrible wind and I had to I had to cut that I had to top off my onions because they were so broken and bent up and tore up from all those winds I cut them off short to let them start over and I told you they don't take very long to recover so take a look at what they've done in just a one week sound if you look all the way down you can see those tops have bounced back like they don't even remember that they were cut they are right now working on bulbs and that's what we want to do come back in and I'll ring them in again like we talked about make sure that bulbs got plenty of room to swell out and in the meantime remember we planted some green onions in a separate area in a little little container so we're going to have some salad and salmon today so I'm going to make a salad to Sacramento so let's let's harvest one of our little green onion buckets and I'll show you what they look like but this looks like a good one see it's ready and I just grabbed the whole bunch I pull it right straight out of the pot it's going to beep little roots and see all my roots they fill that pot up and we've got some good onions coming out so let's let's go over to the processing table let's clean this up a little bit and see what we really got get back over okay I'll take these in the house and wash them up a little bit better and we'll chop these up and see how they make some nice little bulbs and man those are good in a salad I just love these things so that'll be pretty tasty this afternoon okay that gets a big draw for 15 weeks and I just wanted to bring you back up and show you the progression you look down the road you can see that they're already starting to produce bowls remember what I was son our last last time I talked to you we had a lot of wicked wind and it wreaked havoc on the onions have been them all up and I had to actually cut them off and replant some of them because it was being pulled out of the ground so rough but since then they've done well and actually had more storms in this lock them all over again but I wanted you to look at something and notice something here these plants when they get knocked down you can see how crooked they are some of them are even laying on their side see the onions down in there and as long as some of those roots are still in the ground they're going to grow you know what this up here is doing I'll bend up and everything density that's irrelevant nobody cares about that let me show you something I want you to UM notice is here's one that's all bent let's just pull it see how much root is actually in the ground so it can be laying over like this and still feeding just fine because that roots down in the ground it's okay and even though it's bent and knocked over like this it was laying like that look how it managed to grow is trying to find its way back to the Sun so it's okay if they're laying over don't worry about that we'll take this and I'll cut that put down on my cheeseburger I'll set that over there for later but another thing I want you to watch out for on your onions is this right here keep an eye out for this they get to about this stage they're going to want to bolt and when they do they send up this chute right here and what that is that's your onion seeds that's going to be a little flower and it's going to have seed in it but it's trying to bolt to seed you want to pop them off every where you see one and direct that energy right back down to that bulb because of this trying to the bolt it's not doing anything on that bulb anymore so always watch for these well they've been in the ground for four months sweet onions are ready to start eat and think about these sweet onions are a sweet onions a wet onion and try to keep that in mind when you're trying to harvest these that you don't want to harvest all your onions at once they are not going to dry out like a cooking onion they're going to always be a little bit wet and if you try to save them for long periods of time they're just going rot so what what I normally do is when my onions get up about the size then um I know it's time to go ahead and start pulling them out of the ground you know a dozen or so at the time so we can be enjoying those onions and leave the rest of the onions in there as long as I can and keep coming out pulling more as I need them that way you know they're being saved naturally and they're still growing a little bit so this way when I harvest in in batches it makes it stretch out a little bit longer on the saving them because it's tough just to store oh sweet onion because they're so wet so we're going to pull up some of the day so we can start enjoying them and there'll be a time coming in two weeks ahead where they actually get to where they're they can't stay in the ground any longer or they have a chance of rotten so there'll be a time coming in the next few weeks where I'm going to have to pull the whole rope and at that point we eat onions they coming out of our ears and they'll last us about they'll ask me about three months so what happened through the summer and we share them with Nancy's family and and between us and what we share with neighbors there's plenty of onions for everybody so let me show you what to get started with the day I'm going to pull out some right here to end this is see how it is um it's not quite as big as a baseball yet but that's a good onion and it's a good time to go ahead and pull it because I can start eating this now so let me pull out some of these right now there you go pull up two more let's go over to the processing station and clean these up a little bit and we'll get ready to start II start eating some onion rings okay we're ready to process these out a little bit this is how I normally do my onions my sweet onions I cut off just above the bulb I come up just about two inches above that and I take that off and you can go through and pick out the greenest part of these tops if you want to you can cook them in your crock pots or in your salads or whatever but right now I'm just trying to get onions I've got plenty of green onions around here I don't cut the root up into the bulb I leave about a quarter of an inch I leave about a quarter of an inch of that ball root on that book bottom of that bowl because I don't want this thing to lose all that water that's inside of it because that's the part that makes these sweet onions the sweetest they so sweet to put them in here we rinse them off and I'll take these and I'll let these dry out drop dry off I'll even dry them off with a paper towel if I have to you don't want to put up any onion like this with water droplets on it you want to make sure that it's dry because if you leave these water droplets on there it doesn't take but a couple of days and they'll have little spots of mildew on them and they in really fit eat so I I clean them get all the filth off of them from being in the ground trim off the bottom and I dry them off and then I put them in a little little onion bag that I saved from the grocery store all winter and I just store them and these these will last me a couple of months and they're going to keep getting bigger out there in the garden so I start eating them when they're small like this because we can start enjoying them while the rest of them are still growing bigger and bigger they'll continue to grow until they're about that big you know about this between the size of a baseball and a softball right in between there that'll be about the size they eventually get to but for now we can start enjoying our onions so let me get to work I got lot to do and if you'll excuse me I'm not running the house and make me some onion rings for cypher noon so if you like our videos it's been fun going through this journey with the onions together with you if you like our videos go ahead and subscribe to our channel we'd love for you to be a part of our YouTube family so always remember to receive istance we're fed this Lord our daily bread amen have a blessed day you you thanks for watching our videos we really love making them if you like our videos please like our Facebook page to get the latest tips and tricks please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the newest video like it it would really inspire and encourage us but most importantly share to encourage others will welcome your comments in question thank you have a blessed day

Channel: Hollis and Nancys Homestead

Views: 332,210

Keywords: Harvest Onion, grow onion, onion, plant onion, how to, grow, organic, heirloom, potatoes, containers, potatoes container, harvest, pepper, garden, carrot, vegetable, homestead, tomatoes, squash, eggplants, cucumbers, cabbage, backyard, urban, fall vegetable, green, cooking, spinach harvest, Hollis and Nancy’s homestead, walla walla, tips, gardening Tips, onion tips, bigger onions, how to grow onions, how to harvest onions, complete growing guide, advanced, best tips, harvest onions, grow onions

Id: GSi2H_djelk

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 04 2016