How to harvest and cure onions for long term storage (and what to do when conditions aren't ideal)

[Music] hey guys my name is rachel and welcome back to oxford gardening today i'm talking about how to harvest and cure onions for storage overall this is a pretty simple concept and i'm going to show you step by step exactly what i mean all right so i am right here in front of my onion patch and before we get too too deep into exactly how and why to harvest your onions i want to make sure that you understand some things about onions that are kind of base level knowledge that you need in order to have a successful harvest so the first thing you need to understand is that the length of the day is the thing that is going to trigger your onions to bulb up and actually make the big onion that you want to harvest when you're looking for what type of onion you're going to plant in the first place there are a few different options and i do have a video where i go over all of that all of your options and how you're going to choose the right option for you but the short answer is that they are long day and short day onions and there are also some that are kind of in the middle but this refers to the actual length of day that is required to trigger this bulbing process and you need to choose an onion that needs a length of day that you can provide and so generally people who live farther from the equator have a chance to grow long day onions because their day length in the summer gets longer than people who live closer to the equator where our days are more even as the year goes round but that means in the summer our days aren't as long as if you are farther from the equator so with that said if you have the right kind of onion planted when the days get long enough it triggers this bulbing and you'll see after you plant your onion it's going to be a lot of greens and greens and greens and greens and then when it hits that day length to trigger bulbing very suddenly you'll start to see this bulb growth happening and it's really exciting and that's when you need to start watching your onions for this behavior right here where they are starting to flop over a flocked over onion is a good sign this means that the bulb is done growing basically it means that this stem is no longer full of water and the plant is no longer putting energy into growing which means that this this bulb this onion is as big as it's going to get this year and it is ready for harvest you can see i have this onion here it is just as big if not bigger than that other one but this stem is still firm and so that means that this onion is actually not quite yet done growing and i could harvest it right now but why would i when i could wait for it to get a little bigger you absolutely can pull onions early if most of your onions are done and some of them aren't you can go ahead and pull them all and that should be just fine for you they should store the same but the thing you're losing there is just a little bit of extra growth that you could have gotten if you had waited now the next thing we have to address is what to do when your onions start to flower prematurely so a flowering onion looks like this you can see this stalk that it put up is much much higher taller than any of its leaves and it is sort of firmer than any of its leaves and so even before you see the flower at the top you know if it puts on a stem that looks like this that it is getting ready to flower so the reason that your onions might go to seed prematurely there are a lot of them and there's no way that i would be able to tell you exactly why it happened but it could be some combination of factors something to do with the weather if it wasn't very steady if you had like sudden ups and downs in temperature over the growing season if perhaps your onions didn't get enough water when they needed it a lot of environmental factors can go into onions going to seed additionally if you bought sets instead of starts sets are second year onions and those are more likely to go to seed than first year onions because onions generally like to go to seed in their second year all right so let's talk about when to harvest your onions so i mentioned that you needed to start watching for them to flop over that is the first sign that they are ready to harvest and you need to harvest them pretty soon after that you do have quite a window of time so don't panic don't think that you have to harvest them right then but you what you want to do is start watching the weather because ideally you will harvest your onions after it has been dry for a couple of days and then as it is going to be dry for a few more days in a row because ideally you'll cure your onions outside in the garden now of course i understand that this ideal circumstance is unlikely for you it has not happened for me yet um and so i'm going to show you what to do if you are not getting these ideal circumstances so the reason you're going to want to wait until you've had a couple of dry days in a row is because you want to start getting this papery skin on the outsides of your onions as you're getting ready to harvest and while it is possible to pull them after rain this will be in better shape as you're pulling them out of the ground after it has been dry for at least a day or two in a row preferably sunny too because the whole thing that you're doing when you're curing onions is you're basically drying them out obviously not entirely because they're not dehydrating but we are getting a lot of the water out of this stem portion so in addition to drying out that papery outer layer that kind of protects the onion during the curing process like i said you are waiting for that stem to kind of dry out and as it dries out it sort of seals together the inside of the onion that you are not wanting to dry out and it keeps all of that kind of just naturally in a little nature made tupperware so to say um and as the onion cures a third important thing happens which is sugars get replaced with those pungent compounds that we know onions to have and many of us love some of us hate which is why onions when you pick them fresh and eat them fresh they are sweeter than cured onions or stored onions not all onions need curing not all onions can be cured so be sure to check out for your specific variety whether or not it needs to be cured but if we're gonna go for like a general rule yellow white red onions you know those onions you buy at the store those are cured onions and if you're growing something like that chances are good that it's gonna need to be cured all right so let's go pick some onions together and let me show you exactly what i do to get them out of the ground so what you're going to do is grab the stem and kind of wriggle it out of the soil you can twist a bit and just pull it straight up and out [Music] and you will have your onion now if you have the ideal conditions oh cat coming over to investigate if you have the ideal conditions you would take them out and lay them on top of your garden your soil wherever and let these cure in the sun for as long as possible until it looks like it's going to rain and as i understand it most of us don't have ideal conditions and so what i would say is most important is to look for those first couple of days after it has rained or at least has been dry for a couple of days before you go to harvest i think that's more important than having it be dry after you harvest because it's much much easier to bring your onions indoors for the curing than it is to protect your onions from rain prior to picking them if you are getting a lot of rain and you're just feeling like oh is it going to be too late do i need to pick them in the rain anyway you do have like i said a few weeks of a window like i'd say maybe two to three after they flop over three is kind of pushing it and if you go through all of that time period and it rains like every single day or stays damp and you really just don't get a break you can go ahead and pull them at the driest part of the day and bring them inside and do your best to cure them that way but i will say you do have a chance of them not curing as well if you do end up having to do that and they might not store as long although when you do pick them in the rain like you could pick them fresh in the rain and eat them right away or dehydrate them or something and they would be perfectly fine this is only if you really want to cure them that you have to worry about the weather alright so i am going to go ahead and pull all of the onions that have flopped i'm going to leave the ones that haven't because i do have the luxury of picking around and choosing which ones i harvest and i will probably have the right amount of dry days to be able to choose when to harvest those other ones once they do eventually flop over oh you will find people who will recommend that as you're laying your onions you stack the tops of some over the bulbs of the others to sort of protect them from the sun and i find that like that's not necessarily a bad thing to do but i wouldn't say that that's an absolute requirement i think you have to be really careful with what you do depending on your climate if you're somewhere where it's really super sunny and the sun is going to be like beating down on them all day if you leave them outside then yeah i think covering them would make sense but if you're somewhere where it's going to be kind of cloudy and only like mid warm during the day then you might not want to cover them because really like i said what you want is you want them to sort of dry out and they can't do that as well in a cloudy somewhat damp place if they're going to be covered by the leaves of their neighbors all right i'm going to now address some frequently asked questions that i imagine are on your brain right now first question if it's a tiny onion should i still harvest it and the answer is if it has flopped then yes unfortunately it is not going to get any bigger than this if it has flopped and this is still a perfectly usable onion you could go ahead and cure it and it would probably be just fine but it's probably also just fine for throwing into whatever recipe you're making this week and just using as a fresh onion or spring onion okay next question if you pull your onion and it doesn't have really any visible brown papery skin to it is that okay can i still cure it the answer is yes you can still cure an onion that looks like this it's just that this outer layer that isn't dried out yet will dry out and it will become the outer skin of the onion that you expect to be brown and papery and what that means is that your usable onion will be smaller than you expect a lot of times you'll see this with onions that are already kind of small so like with the other one i do sort of suggest that you go ahead and use it fresh if it looks like this because you'll just get more usable onion out of it overall but you definitely can still cure this if you want to all right another question you might have is should i wash the dirt off of it before i cure it the answer is no you actually shouldn't do anything to it before you cure it you should leave the leaves attached you should leave the roots attached and if you're going to clean the dirt off of it just brush it a little bit with your fingers but do not wash it before you cure it if it is still caked in dirt after you cure it you can just peel the outer layer of paper off and it will look nice and bright and shiny just like if you got it at the grocery store so don't sweat the dirt leave everything attached because all of this is important for helping this stem remember like i said seal up all of the moisture into the bulb for long-term storage okay now what if it suddenly rains on your onions halfway through curing you left them out you were told by the weather service that it wasn't gonna rain and yet it rained anyway what do you do are they still okay well the answer is that it's complicated they might be okay they might not if you can bring them inside before if you notice that that's happening or if it's just starting to happen bring them inside somewhere dry so that they don't get soaked by the rain as they're curing but if it does happen then it depends on how the weather is going to be later i would say if it's going to continue raining go ahead and bring them inside if it looks like it's going to clear up and be sunny again then i would just leave them outside and i would go through them and make sure none of them are sitting in puddles of water and that they're kind of up off the ground like you saw i was setting mine on top of the straw mulch that i have in my garden and that's going to help the water drain off of them if there if there was to be a sudden storm and they were to get wet however if this does happen to your onions and then they continue to cure and look normal i would say just just treat them with caution keep in mind that the curing process might not have gone exactly as planned and that they might go bad sooner than expected and you know that's okay i am coming out with another video to show you guys all the different ways that you can store onions that you can preserve them and this is going to be especially useful for those ones that are starting to go bad early those ones that have gone to seed these tiny ones that i've been showing you etc all right another question you might have is what about onions that look like this you can see this onion has split pretty pretty intensely and this type of onion while it is totally good for fresh eating it is not going to store very well because remember what we're trying to do when we cure onions is create a barrier around it that seals in not just moisture but seals out bacteria and things that would cause them to go bad and that's why they can be stored at room temperature for so long is because this all of this is acting as a barrier against bacteria and mold and all of that and when that is split like this then bacteria can get in and cause it to rot and so if you pick it and it looks like this don't bother curing it just go ahead to preservation techniques for like i said the smaller onions and the onions that have gone to seed and as far as what could cause it to split like this it could be a number of factors could be uneven watering it could be over fertilization if you just have a couple like this sometimes that just happens if you all of them look like this or most of them look like this then you might want to check into your onion growing methods but just seeing a couple of these it's not a big deal and you've got an excuse to make something with onions all right what about onions that have gone to seed can you still pick those yes you can they are perfectly edible as long as you don't cut them open and see mold on the inside if they look fine they are fine you can eat them but you cannot cure them to store them because what happens is the flower stock goes into the middle of the bulb and it sort of ends up creating an air pocket and that air pocket can harbor bacteria and it's not as full of moisture as everything else and so it just ends up being not a good situation for storing an onion long term but like i said you can do a lot of other stuff with it and i'll address that in my onion preservation video coming up okay and what about if you go to pick your onion and you accidentally decapitate it well what you can do is you can just reach in and kind of claw the onion out of the dirt um but this one also won't be as good for storage because like i said we need to leave those leaves attached to help it make that little seal that is going to seal it up in its own natural skins and keep it free of bacteria and keep the water in this is my decapitated onion i'm just going to reach in here pull him up and this is going to go in the pile of stuff to be preserved sooner rather than later oh look it's also split it wouldn't have been any good anyway any good for storing that is plenty good for other things hey guys so before i ended this video i wanted to show you guys what a cured onion looks like it has been a little over a month for these onions they were stored mostly indoors in an air-conditioned vented room on a wire rack and you can see everything is crispy crunchy oh this is even falling off there's no green left it is just brown stems and i did peel off a little bit of the outer layer here that had the dirt on it and i clipped the roots so this onion is ready for storage if you wanted to you could pull off the stem at this point but what i did with a bunch of mine because i actually braided them the way you would braid garlic they don't turn out quite as pretty and flat but they do make cute little bunches for hanging around i hope this has answered most of your questions about harvesting and curing onions but if you do have more leave them in the comments and i will do my best to get to them thank you guys so much for watching and until next time i wish you happy gardening

Channel: Auxhart Gardening

Views: 73,805

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Id: sJcJNYiBD0M

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022