How to Plant Onions in Containers

[Music] hey i'm brian with next level gardening if you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips tricks and support to help you 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 now let's get growing it's time to plant onions if you live in a mild winter climate if you don't you can use the same information in the spring if you do live in a cold winter climate where you get snow and freezes then i will remind you in the spring when it's time to plant your onions let me know in the comments if you've grown onions before and if they were successful if they were a failure i had plenty of failures which i'll talk about in a minute to successfully grow onions you need to know how they grow and why they perform the way they perform i didn't know that for more years than i care to admit but i would year after year get a harvest that looked like this not too impressive then i found out that there are certain types of onions that you grow in certain places onions are photothermoperiodic just meaning that they are very sensitive to the day length and to the temperature that they're growing in so in the beginning of its life cycle an onion seedling will put up a lot of greenery and they will grow only greenery until the day length reaches a specific amount of hours and that signals the onion to stop leaf production and to start bulb production which is what you want unless you're growing green onions and then it doesn't matter so my problem and why i got those puny little nothing onions is because i was growing the wrong kind of onion those onions were waiting for long days more daylight hours than we have here in a day and so they never started to develop their bulbs or they started too late and didn't have time so different onion varieties need a specific amount of sunlight day hours for a specific amount of days and so you have to look they're all or should be all labeled whether they're short day intermediate day or long day onions i'm going to put a map up right here the further north you go from the equator you're going to grow long day onions because your day length in the spring and summer are longer days than uh in the south and so if you're in the middle part those are intermediate day and if you're in the south those would be short day onions so my problem was i was growing long day onions when i was supposed to be growing short day onions and here's one of the problems this is why you have to know where you are what type of onions you should be growing and then the onions you're looking at you need to know what they are because at least here in southern california there are long day onions at the nurseries and garden centers and there are short day onions right next to them now long day onions will never produce anything here and so it's really disingenuous of the nurseries to actually even have those on their shelves they need to put out products that grow and i'm sure not all nursery nurseries are like this but a lot of them are uh they need to put out products that their customers can actually grow so just know before you go in that you probably will be hit up with a couple of options and you need to know what your option should be now there's a couple different ways to grow onions you can grow them from seed you can grow them from transplants or you can grow them from sets seeds are pretty self-explanatory transplants are just seeds that are sprouted for you already and sets are um a bulb that's grown from the previous year to a small size you get a little bulb and you get little leaves on top and you plant those in the ground i have never had luck with sets let me know in the comments if you have or if you're kind of had the same experience as i did where they really just don't produce like they should so i prefer to grow from seed or from transplants i'm going to insert a little video clip right here of how to grow from seed because this year i chose to grow from transplants and here's the reason why there are i can't even tell you how many plants in each one of these six cells so it's not the same you know generally i grow from seed first of all because of the variety you get more variety to look for seeds rather than go to the garden center they probably just have a couple of varieties of whatever you want to grow um and second it's cost you know generally this a six pack like this here would cost you know four dollars and something and if you're buying peppers or cucumber you're gonna get six plants for four dollars and something well here i might have a hundred 200 plants for four dollars and something so for me to get a jump on things i'm gonna go with the transplants because they actually had the same variety texas grano or grano that i grew last year from seed so it just made sense i was there i saw them i thought so just gives you a head start but if you want to grow from seed you can still do that right now in november if you're in a mild winter climate so i'm going to insert that video clip right now very short to show you uh just the special needs of onion seeds and how to plant them and i'll be right back and we'll get started planting separating and planting these onion transplants now onions like loose well-draining soil they also like lots of sun so what i'm going to do is i have drip lines going through the bed so i'm just going to make sure that my little trenches are right under the drip lines so i'm just gonna and it they're only gonna be about a quarter inch deep at the most so right along the drip line i'm gonna make a little trench all right now i'm gonna sprinkle the seeds in and you wanna do it you know you don't have to worry too much about the spacing because we can thin them and the great thing about onions is in a month or two you're going to see if you've got blank spots or if you've got spots that are too full of seedlings and you can pluck the ones that are not pluck them but gently pull them out of wet soil and it's really hard to kill an onion seedling they're very sturdy and so pull them out of the spots where you have too many and just transplant them into the spots where you might have a little thin area so i'm just going to sprinkle the seeds i have an average amount just right along that trench and then just cover it up then i'm going to water them in and once they're up i'm going to start feeding them every two weeks with a well-balanced fertilizer so i'll be using either the neptune's harvest tomato and veg or the neptune's hard harvest fish and kelp just as a general purpose fertilizer every couple of weeks and then you're going to want to stop doing that after about four to five months you're going to see the plant starting to bulb up at that point you don't want to give them any extra nitrogen what happens if you give them extra nitrogen during the bulbing process is the bulbs will start to split you definitely don't want that so once they start to bulb they're done with the fertilizer until harvest time all right so now it's time to plant our onion transplants i'm going to be planting in containers now this is the same method whether you're planting in the ground or in a raised bed or in a container just because i am in a state of flux right now i've got a temporary vegetable garden right here and i also have the brand new vegetable garden that's still under construction and if you haven't seen either of these being done go over to my other channel next level homestead and you can see the progress of that so i'm gonna plant these onions because this temporary vegetable garden right here is actually that it's temporary it's until spring when the new vegetable garden is done and i can start planting over there now all of these crops here are fall and winter crops and so they'll be done by spring onions are not the same they will grow through probably next june which is going to take up this area or wherever i put it for longer than that season and so i don't i can't do that right now so i'm going to be growing them in containers and if you grow in containers i know a lot of you do you can grow right along with me so the first thing we need to do if starting from transplants is actually separate the plants themselves you do not want to plant this entire plug in the same spot i don't know there's like 20 plants here and um that you can't fit 20 onion bulbs in this amount of space so they're very forgiving onions are really forgiving plants so just kind of tease this root ball apart and start to expose the roots and then gently give it a tug and you'll start to see individual little plants that you can just tease out just like that now this is one of the containers i'm gonna be growing my onions in um it's one of these uh metal wash tubs that i brought from the other house so i'm gonna go fill it up with some compost and i'll be right back now the spacing for onions kind of depends on the uh final size of the variety but generally you know fist size or a little bit bigger there's some varieties that are two-fifth sizes but typically six to eight inch spacing is is a good rule of thumb and for the depth you want to plant just where where you see where it starts to turn white you want about half of that little tiny bulb like structure under the ground or or even just the whole thing where it starts turning white just where it comes out of the ground just firm around them a little bit also make sure they're spaced from the edge of the container if you get to a part b hello filming okay if you get to a part where they don't pull off as easily one by one uh go ahead and take it in the center of the entire clump and pull it apart and that's gonna start to loosen it up a little bit more again see now they come out easily one by one all right so i got 15 onions in this container and i only have to find space for another 300 more like i said they're very forgiving uh so if you plant them a little bit deeper than you're supposed to or a little more shallow than you're supposed to they're typically going to figure themselves out so one of the cool things about onions is they have you think about their bulb and then the roots underneath the bulb they go fairly deep with their root system they're also a long growing crop they take a long time to produce like i said from now until june and so all this space the soil underneath them you can actually over plant or interplant with something else like lettuce now this is tom thumb it's a small head lettuce i guess it was just a freebie from baker creek i'm going to go ahead and sprinkle that over the um the surface of the soil here and i'll get a good two three crops of lettuce before the onions are ready to harvest so it's just a way to save space if you're growing in containers you may be a small space gardener and this is just going to help maximize your space even more so just sprinkle that lettuce pretty liberally over the top of the soil i'm just going to scratch it in they don't need to be buried very deep at all so this will be more than enough um you can also plant small flowers so this time of year maybe pansies or something like that and then i'm just going to take a little bit of straw and just loosely sprinkle it over i'm actually used to the straw that i used to get was a lot finer than this so i may source it from a different area next time now most of the time any type of straw is going to be fine but when you've got something as delicate or small as these onion seeds seedlings or lettuce a little bit finer straw would probably be better but i'm just going to put a little bit over just to protect the soil from the sun keeping a little moisture for the lettuce seeds that we need to germinate and then just make sure that these onions are still standing straight up tall they will work themselves out but they really it's better if they grow straight up from the soil and don't have to make any kind of turns now if you planted onion seed instead of transplants that's no problem you can continue to you can just put the uh the straw down and it will find its way straight up through there now i'm also gonna plant and i don't know where yet but i got some um just green bunching onions these could be planted just about anywhere uh and at any time they can be planted right now and actually have a harvest in about 30 days and they're frost hardy so wherever you are right now as long as there's no snow on the ground um you might be able to get some bunching onions in so that's it i hope you learned something if you did give the video a thumbs up it really helps and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 115,496

Keywords: planting onions, planting onions in the fall, planting onions from seed, planting onions from scraps, planting onions in containers, planting onions from bulbs, planting onions from old onions, planting onions at home, planting onions in raised beds, planting onions garden answer, planting onions and garlic, planting onions in pots, planting onions sets, planting onions indoors, growing onions, how to grow onions, gardening, onion, onions, how to plant onions, grow, plant, organic

Id: 7GUJBnzYy-o

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021