How to Harvest, Cure, and Store Onions

well today's video is sponsored by dixondale farms we want to thank the good folks over there at dixondale for the generous donation of all the texas super sweet onions you sent to me and nancy you really got us off to a good start so we've got all the onions we're going to need for a whole year and we thank you for that donation it's a great product we've used you for many years and we sure do recommend anybody that's wanting to plant some onions this year go check out dixondale farms you'll find them to be some great people to work with with a high quality product check you [Music] later [Music] well welcome back friends today's video is going to be on how to cure and store un sweet onions for long-term storage um me and nancy just got through planting a stand of onions here there are 600 onions in this row we have other videos on how to actually plant onions and grow onions so if you haven't ever seen any of those videos nancy put a link on our on on the channel for you to go check out those videos on how to grow them these are a really good variety they're called texas super sweet we got them donated by dixondale farms graciously donated these farms to sponsor our video today so we're gonna let these this row grow all until next summer early summer and when it's time to harvest these we'll come out here and harvest them up we'll get them in the drying rack and we'll dry them out and cure them and then we'll prepare them for long-term storage over in our pantry and i think that anybody that wants to grow onions can do the same process together so we'll be back next summer as these things are ready to harvest and we'll be back then and we'll get them out of the ground together and get them over in there to long-term storage so we'll see you back here in a few months well good morning our texas super sweets have been growing for five months since the last time i talked to you and as you can see they are really producing they are now ready pretty much ready to harvest as you can see the tops are starting to die off a lot of times the tops will lay all the way over if they don't if your onions don't lay over but you see the tops of them dying back like that then go ahead you know they're okay to harvest they don't necessarily have to lay over a lot of folks will take a board and they'll go along the roads here and they push them over and all the way down the road to force them over to direct some of that energy right back down in the bulbs but i don't really think i need to do that because my bulbs are pretty big and take take a look at her take a look at our onions here's one right here and as you can see it's already good size onion i don't and as you can see the tops are pretty soft so if i was to push on that real easy it would stay right over but these are basically ready to go i'll take this one in for lunch today but uh we'll be back in a couple of days and we'll go ahead and harvest these up and get them into drying racks so we can um we can start enjoying these uh these onions we'll get them into long-term storage so we'll be back in a couple days and we'll get these out the ground see you then [Music] well today's harvest day on the onions they've been growing really good so we're pulling up the onions and we're going to get them over to the uh to the drying racks today and we're going to get them drying and uh these are the texas super sweets they're very sweet very tasty we've already started eating on these for the last couple of weeks so um they're we've enjoyed them so these uh these onions are doing great and we'll be busy today making our harvest so let's get to it [Music] do [Music] okay when you get ready to cure your onions for long-term storage uh you get all the onions up to the racks you can do this anywhere in your yard that has shade and it's dry and it's ventilated if you have those three components then you should be able to cure your onions very easily we have a curing rack here if you ever want to build one of these for yourself we got some videos on our um youtube channel nancy can give you a link on how to build a drying rack but we got about half the onions that we had last year so we just used two top rows on these things so i don't have to bend over because i got a bad back but anyway here's how you do it you take the onion and you lay them in here parallel with each other with all the greens out and then you do the next row on top so that all the onions are always on the top of the greens and they're exposed all we have to do is leave these out here for about five to seven days and these tops as you see right now real green and pliable what you want is in about five days these will all be hard dry and crispy and at that point we'll trim off the tops about an inch above the bulb and we'll trim off the roots because they'll be dry and that onion will be dried out somewhat to the point where you can now put it in your long-term storage and it should last several months the uh the sweet onions usually don't last as long as the other ones but last year when we put up our texas sweet onions our texas um i'm sorry texas legend they lasted seven months these are texas super sweet they're they're basically about the same um this is probably the equivalent of you know us you know what people call a vidalia it's pretty close to that um i think it's a pretty sweet onion i i think the vidalia might be just a little bit better but um these are really pretty good it's a yellow onion so anyway these are great cooking onions um let's get these dried out and we'll take it to the next step the next thing we're going to do is we took all these great big ones and we're drying them and we saved all the little medium one to small ones and we're fixing to trim them all up and we take it up to the local soup kitchen folks always ask why do you have so much onions do you sell them no we don't sell nothing here on the homestead we give it to friends and family and those in need and um the soup kitchen is a local soup kitchen here we're close to where we live and we take stuff up there periodically to give to them and they can cook it and give meals free meals to folks that are just in need folks that just are down and out so it's a good way to help some people with with your garden so if you're growing stuff in your garden and you grow extra always try to help those that need to help you give them a hand up and it can be a blessing so let's get started on cleaning up the rest of these [Music] onions [Music] well that was a a busy morning got all our onions harvested up um we got three nice big huge baskets of the medium to small onions which we're going to be donating to the local soup kitchen and we put up three more um 25 pound bags for nancy's mama and her friend and they can take with them today and start enjoying these and we got two of the racks the top shelf and uh both racks uh full of the really el grandes the real big ones so they would take about a cure a week to cure and then we'll come back and take it to the next step and show you we'll trim them down and get them over into into a four-week pantry for long-term storage so i hope you had fun this morning we'll be back in about a week and we'll finish up the video and show you how to take these out of the rack and trim them down and get them ready for the for the pantry so we'll see you back in about a week [Music] yep pretty dry they're ready to go [Music] man down yeah i guess we wanted to rock and roll today huh okay you ready to get started mama mm-hmm something you really look forward to every year is trimming onions ain't it it's delicious i can't it's worth it it's worth a little investment of time and labor because boy these last uh this lasted last year for seven months you know after we did this so as you can see the um the green tops last week those green tops were really green and flexible as you see today they limp noodles and they're dried out really nice and all we have to do at this point is trim off the top about an inch above the bulb and we trim off these roots see how they've dried out and at that point after we get them all trimmed down we'll take them and put them in the pantry over there for long-term storage now these have never been wet i've never washed them they're just dry as they've been the day i pulled them out of the ground and i never will wash them um you can brush them off a little bit if you want but it's really not necessary because when you get ready to eat these onions you're going to peel them anyway but i usually kind of brush them off a little bit simply because i don't want to get a whole bunch of dirt inside the pantry for me to have to clean up later so that's what we do step up close let's take a little quick shot of how um how we trim them down to get them ready okay this is a very simple procedure i use these little uh poultry shears they work just right for this kind of work and these are pretty cheap you can get them anywhere online but these um here's the top of the uh the onion i just take it right there and snip that right off come to the bottom sniff off the root and that one's ready to head on over as you can see it's still a little bit wet after you do that but that's going to dry out the rest of the way when it gets over into the pantry so one thing that you want to remember when you wherever you store your onions first of all don't store them with your potatoes and that the onions need to have a dry space well ventilated and dark if you can do those three then um these things are gonna cure up finish curing up and last you for several weeks many weeks so let's get started and get this chore done for today [Music] nice big onions [Music] so [Music] don't take long or very many onions to make that basket heavy okay set them in like this with the stem down we got um this is our first basket we got one two three four baskets to do and what we do is we set them with the stem down like this and the root side up and the racks and or will lay them on the table like that and these this area out here is air conditioned we keep it 75 degrees out here so that keeps a good um flow of ventilation going through here which is what you need with the onions you need some air movement you don't want all those gases just sitting there if you don't have a rack that's all right just um set them on a piece of plywood up on a couple of saw horses we do that quite often as well you just just want to make sure they're laying somewhere flat and you really don't want to stack them on top of each other i'm going to try to keep them separate and when you run out of space up there we have some gigantic drawers on the bottom we'll put them in there too i just got them up here for now because it's in the direct flow of this little air condition unit right here which blows right down there just right [Music] that's a lot of onions yup love them taste good well there we go we did it onion lady got plenty of big onions up here these are all our big onions uh why don't you pull out the drawer down there and show them all the little medium to smalls as you can see that bottom drawer holds quite a bit it's pretty full and we have two more drawers just like it right here that are now empty so as soon as these um cure off a little bit this next week then we'll be taking them off of this table up here and putting them down in the drawers for long-term storage so anyway that's how we do it i hope you enjoyed the video and i i hope that it helps you learn a little bit on how to cure onions because as you can see dain nothing to it anyone can do this so anyway we thank you for watching and we hope our video brought a smile to your face and it made your own hands smell like onions so tell me and ness to see you next time always remember buy us hands we are fed give us lord our daily bread amen have a blessed day and bing bing you're not supposed to eat onions that's bad for you that's toxic to babies [Music] you

Channel: Hollis and Nancys Homestead

Views: 98,001

Keywords: huge harvest onion, curing onions, long term storage onion, hollisnancyshomestead, how to cure onions, how to harvest onions, homestead, onions, onion, growing onions, growing onion, how to grow onions, harvesting onions, harvest onions, onion harvesting, storing onions, onion storage, how to store onions, harvesting, growing, gardening, vegetabe gardening, gardener, vegetable gardener, garden plan, gardening guides, edible gardening, grow your own, homegrown

Id: 01sucuwf20k

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2022