How To Harvest and Cure Onions So They Last You For Months!

welcome back to jacqu In the Garden today it's all about aliam specifically onions and how to know when they're ready to harvest how to harvest them how to cure them so they last for many months in your pantry and everything in between I will be touching on garlic a little bit today as well but the first thing I want to talk about is how to tell that this onion is actually ready to harvest and right here is the primary sign that I'm looking for besides the fact that onions are extremely easy to grow they're pretty much something you just put in the ground forget about and then they turn into onions the other thing I really like about them is that they will tell you when they ready to harvest there are a couple telltale signs the most prominent is what I was alluding to earlier which is this broken or flopped over neck so let me show you what I'm looking for across this onion patch here and a couple things that might seem like they're not ready because the neck hasn't flopped but there are other ways to check that as well I did want to mention though that you don't actually have to wait for your onions to dry before you harvest and eat them you'll actually notice that there are a lot of bare patches here in my onion patch cuz I have been harvesting and eating them throughout the spring the only reason why you would want to wait for them to dry down or for them for the neck to flop is so that you could actually store these onions that is what the process of curing does is It prepares the onions for storage by making sure that everything is nice and dried that all the skin and wrappers are nice and tight so that this onion can sit in your pantry for a few months before going B that is it that is why you are waiting for this moment also technically if you wait till the end like for the neck flops you will get the most physical onion that you could possibly get whereas if you eat them early you are eating them immature so you're not going to get as much onion for your buck as possible as when they're fully mature and ready to cure like this the other thing I'm looking at besides the obvious flopped necks is that there are a bunch of dried leaves and the onion has actually started to develop its wrapper that is one of the primary reasons we are curing to get these wrappers to seal up really nicely and protect all that moisture inside this bulb from evaporating during storage so having a flop neck having dried leaves and actually sometimes you might have some green left on your onion like this and it flops that's still means it's ready other times you will have basically no green and it's also ready so the neck flop is number one but dried leaves and the fact that the bulb is even the right size are sure telltale signs that these are ready to harvest so let's take a closer look at some of these onions and why they can be tricky over here you could see that these have flopped which is the great sign that they are ready but over here these ones haven't quite flopped but they clearly look like they're done growing there's basically actually there's no green at the top so how could they possibly be growing still and why haven't they flopped well sometimes they just don't have enough weight to Simply flop over so what I like to do is just pinch them and right here I could feel it's actually very Hollow feeling like there's nothing actually in there right below it it's a little bit hard right above it it's also a little bit hard and Squishy so while it is not physically flopped it has actually flopped on the inside and here you could feel it's very pinched down and that is a clear Telltale sign that this onion is done growing and it's ready to be harvested for curing so now the only thing left to do is to harvest all of these onions in terms of strategies I think some people like to Fork them underground to make sure that they don't rip their onions I don't usually have a problem with that so I'm going to just try hand pulling until I run into an issue and then I might adapt now I will mention that these are different varieties I did have tags here at some point so this is Southern bell red for the Red Onion over here the last two rows is the Texas Legend yellow onions so these are tend to be a little bit bigger and I believe this final row over here is yellow granx which is one that I grow every every year cuz it's a short day onion that does really well in my climate so let's get picking I will be separating these yellow onions from those but other than that we're just going for it so the only thing I'm really trying to do here is that when I pull the onion I am going to be shaking loose any dirt and also I'm not pulling straight up I'm pulling off to the side like that that makes sure that you don't actually rip or damage the onion as much I think it helps a little bit and the other thing I want to mention here is that before your onions are ready once you start to see that the leaves are turning brown they're starting to dry up a little bit that is a good time to stop Watering your onions I do have drip lines through here but what I did is I actually pinched all the lines so that they could no longer actually let water in because if you let too much water or fertilizer touch your onions at this final stage of their growth what happens is is that they'll get weaker you won't have onions that last as long in storage so that's why it's important that you cut off water cut off fertilizer towards the end of that growing season here's actually a good example of an onion that didn't quite bulp for whatever reason there could be many different reasons but basically at this point this is not an onion that I would cure for a few different reasons first of all it has a lot of green there's zero pinch on this neck it feels really tight and hard and also there's no bulb so this is a perfect onion for just grilling up eating as a spring onion I think yeah I got one more of them over here so fantastic fresh heating onions but not storage onions and the other thing you want to check for is of course any damage like this onion here has all this sort of roughed up surface this one has its neck actually broken and that's because I accidentally stepped on these so these are also going in the fresh eating or at least in the next couple day eating pile instead of the curing pile now the only thing left to do is to load up the onions and bring them back to the curing area where I'll show you exactly what you need to know on how to cure your onions so they last for months but before we do that I want to hop over to the garlic here because right now it's showing signs that it's very close to harvest and I don't want you guys to miss this one tail tail sign so I'm crouched down next to one of my hardneck garlic beds specifically hardneck garlic like I mentioned and the thing I'm trying to show you here today are these over here which are called Scapes the Scapes are the garlic flowers of a hard neck garlic only the hard neck will produce it some sometimes soft necks do I guess but as a general rule of thumb hard necks are the ones that produce Scapes now once you see these and once you see them specifically craw over like this one here you should remove them if you don't remove them you're basically stealing energy from your plant because the garlic plant's going to develop this into a flower and that flower is going to suck up a lot of energy that otherwise would be going down into the ground to form a big bulb so whenever you see these garlic Scapes come up and as soon as you see them sort of flop over you want to just go through Snap them and eat these These are so delicious they're a spring delicacy they taste exactly like garlic maybe like garlic with a green bean you can make pesta with them you could throw them in any time you throw in garlic they just are a little bit more gentle not as like intense of a flavor but they are really delicious and by leaving them on your plants you're going to get a smaller bulb anyway so make sure you remove them and once you remove them it's generally like four to 5 weeks until all of your garlic is ready to harvest so that's all I really want to touch on for garlic today make sure that if you see your Scapes you remove them and also make sure that you eat them so right now I'm standing in the little area in between my two gardens we just harvested the onions out of that side my other Garden is right over there and what I'm doing is I'm setting up underneath this mulberry tree now mberry trees are a little bit messy luckily though the fruit still has quite some time before it's ready to start raining all over the ground here but for now what it's doing is it's providing ample shade when you are curing either even garlic or onions like I am about to show you guys you don't want direct sunlight but you also don't want it to be somewhere that doesn't have good air flow like somewhere indoors so either you set up somewhere indoors and you run fans to get the air flow to make sure that they dry properly or you find somewhere outside that gets plenty of shade and doesn't get direct sunlight so those onions can actually cured rather than cook from the intense Sun heating them up all day so this is what we have here we have a shady area plenty of Breeze that comes through here and what I've done is I've essentially built a table with no top and instead of putting a top on I just attached this welded wire fencing the nice thing about this is that it lets air flow through it also acts as a great grid to organize my onions cuz what I actually like to do here is take my onions and take the stock and then I'll just feed it through one of these holes that'll keep the onion up and I'll make sure that I fit a bunch of onions in here and I could get air flow from beneath to dry the neck and also from above to dry these roots down so now what I'm going to do is fully lay these out here and then I'll talk about what you're looking for during the curing process and how to proceed once all your onions are actually dry a couple things to mention here first of all those are the onions that didn't meet my criteria for being cured because they were either too small too green or they were damaged so there's no point in really trying to save them other than that the rest of these are now set up to cure and I'll probably take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks it depends on a lot of different things first of all I let these onions dry down outside directly in the ground for a while so the necks are already a little bit dry which makes me believe that this will probably take two weeks for me but it also entirely depends on the conditions whether it's dry outside whether it's windy enough all sorts of things like that so 2 to 4 weeks and we'll check back and I'll show you guys exactly what I'm looking for to know that these onions are actually ready to store for a long period of time it has now been 10 days since we set out these onions to cure and dry and they are actually ready a lot of them at least are very much ready to go inside so let me show you what I'm looking for to determine that these are properly cured ready to be processed and brought indoors so a couple different things first of all the papers on the outside here should be fully dry they should be rustly when you touch them just like an onion you buy at the store The Roots down here should be fully dry they'll feel stiff like a brush almost but the main thing that I'm really checking here is right here in the neck when you pinch it and roll your fingers it should feel dry it shouldn't be slipping around too much and then when you have all those conditions everything is true you want to go an inch or two up from the stem like this give it a chop sometimes it's hard to cut cuz it's so dry that the pruners don't even like cutting it and what you'll see inside here is that there is no real moisture nothing is dripping it doesn't feel wet so that for me I'm 100% satisfied that this is properly cured and now I can bring it inside so next thing I like to do is come out the base chop these roots down just to get them a little bit cleaner get some of that dirt off of The Onion and now just like this you have an onion that is ready it's cured you could eat it you could store it for at least a month probably even up to 3 to 6 months and that's a perfect onion now let me show you one that's not fully cured and what you're trying to avoid really so see here even at the very beginning you can see there's a little bit of green left on the stem and the roots are still a little bit Supple they're not as dry if you take a look at them there's still some like moisture in there so what I'm going to do is cut it anyway and I'll show you what I mean so take a look in there so see how there's green also if I squeeze it there's definite moisture in there so that is a sign that this onion was actually pretty close surprisingly um to being cured but it's not quite there so what's going to happen well this one is actually close enough that it'll probably cure just fine but if you do this and you see that it's still very juicy and not dry take this onion inside and just eat it right away it won't last as long in storage but the rest of them I'm actually surprised by how dry they are even the yellow ones that weren't very dry to begin with like that guy is fully cured so onions cure quite quickly I find that they cure much faster than garlic for comparison but all these guys are now ready for me to chop the necks chop The Roots bring them inside I'll have onions for the next couple months well at least we'll see how long they last cuz they're so good when you grow them at home that they're not going to last as long as any onion I buy at the store so thanks for watching hopefully you guys learn about how to cure and harvest your onions and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Jacques in the Garden

Views: 25,747

Keywords: jacques in the garden, epic gardening, urban gardening, compost, backyard gardening, urban homestead, low-till gardening, organic gardening, home garden, home gardening, gardening at home, onions, growing onions at home, hot to grow onions at home, how to harvest onions, how to cure onions, when to harvest onions, why to cure onions, curing onions, harvesting onions

Id: 0nlR5DaBRDo

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024