How to Start Onion Seeds by Bulk Sowing

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener channel it is a beautiful day in the garden today and i am absolutely so excited to feel this nice warm weather it's about 80 degrees today believe it or not i could not believe it when i saw that it was almost 80 degrees i said all right regardless of what's going on i've got to get out in the garden so that's why we're out here today because i pretty much had to make time but i also had to make some time to start some onion seeds because i have not yet done that and i'm a little bit late to the party but better late than never so in today's episode i'm going to be showing you guys how to plant onion seeds now onions are very easy to grow they're super easy to start from seed and i always recommend starting onions from seed because they're better than starting from onion sets one of the most common questions we get is do i start from onion sets or do i start from onion seed and while starting from onion sets seems very convenient because they're already a little pre-grown little onion that's then been it's basically been put through dormancy and then you plant it uh into your garden it seems very convenient however many gardeners find that because onions are biennial that they end up flowering and forming what's called escape and that scape is basically a green center inside of the onion that will never cure properly and so the not only does a lot of energy go towards flowering rather than getting larger onions but also when they do flower that little green center always stays green and so when that happens the the shelf life of the onion is dramatically decreased and so because starting onions from seed is so easy and because you know you can do it in a season you can literally start your seeds and get a harvest in the same season i kind of always say why start from starts why start from sets and so that's what i'm going to do today is i'm going to show you how i start my onion seeds uh we'll start my onions from seed and yeah that's what we're going to do now we are a little bit late we're about three weeks late from when we normally do this however onions germinate very quickly and because they're you know because they're a pretty quick grower i can i can be three weeks late and be totally fine onions do take about 100 to 110 days to fully mature and they mature a little bit differently than other plants in the garden you know when you're growing something like a tomato or a pepper they say 75 days to maturity and the point in which something matures you kind of think is when it's going to bear fruit so you know when when a tomato is fully mature at 75 days you should be bearing fruit when a pepper is uh mature in say 80 days or so you should be getting fruit however onions don't give fruit and they mature in a much different way now onions are what's called photosensitive and that means that they actually mature based on the daylight period so as the days get longer the onions grow faster and once you reach the summer solstice which is the point in which the days actually start getting shorter that's when the onions will will actually enter their bulbing cycle and start maturing and basically the maturing period is when they start storing energy into the bulb of the onion that can then be used as an energy store next year so that's kind of the maturing period so it's a lot different from say a tomato or a pepper without further ado i gotta get back and i have to start sifting our compost so that i can get some some really nice soft potting mix or you know seed starting mix for starting my onions now i'm also gonna start them a little bit differently uh than you probably are are well unless you've watched the channel before i'm going to probably start these onion seeds a lot differently than you're then you're assuming i'm going to start them yes i'm going to use the same kind of soft mix soft loose mix that i usually use to start seeds but the way that we start them and the amount of seeds we put in a container is going to be a lot different so stay tuned let's go all right now because i'm actually going to be starting my seeds outside in containers i don't need to use a sterile potting mix so i'm just going to use some compost but if you're starting your seeds inside you want to make sure that you're using a sterile potting mix something that's going to be free of organic matter and compost and stuff because compost actually harbors a lot of you know creepy crawlies you don't want those in your house things like fungus gnats uh even things like aphids and and white fly can come in on compost it's very common they basically just hibernate in the soil and so wherever you have lots of soil they can be found and so what's really nice is that being outside if there are those pests they're not going to bother the plants as much as if they were inside where there's no checks and balances you know there's no natural predators to feed on those things so therefore they're just going to run rampant in your house so that's why i'd recommend going with a very sterile potting mix something that has coconut husk fiber or peat moss vermiculite per light and maybe like a slow release fertilizer that's a great option for starting seeds indoors but because we're starting seeds outdoors and because we're starting seeds so late in the season i can use compost and that's fine now if you want to start your seeds outside you definitely can do that if you're late like i am you can start your seeds directly in the garden onion seeds are very cold hardy and they can survive a frost even a freeze so if you have cold weather in the forecast don't worry about it but you know we're already so late in the season that pretty much i mean i think just about all the cold weather that we're going to get is gone cross your fingers you know knock on wood i don't think we're going to get too much more cold weather but yeah i am expecting to maybe get a frost here or there and that's going to be totally fine for onions so with that being said i'm going to filter up some of this or sift up some of this compost here and then we'll get started all right so i just got done sifting all the compost and it's actually starting to drizzle but you know what that means april showers bring may flowers so i certainly can't complain but i gotta hurry up and get this stuff planted up here because my camera's not waterproof so let's go all right check this out look at this absolutely beautiful just incredible our compost turned out so good this year and yeah there's little bits of perlite in there because we take our old potting mix throw it into our compost to kind of give it some new life so you just see a little bit of perlite in there but just check that stuff out absolutely amazing and all of this compost was pretty much made with just anything we could find around our yard so composted grass clippings mulch leaves food scraps from the kitchen mulch from around the yard things like that just easy to find stuff and the compost looks amazing now what i'm doing here is i'm actually taking the compost and i'm putting it into three inch pots now the reason why i'm putting them into three inch pots is because i love sewing my onion seeds like this it saves a ton of space and the onions there's no ill effects to the onions now you might be asking yourself if you haven't seen this yet are you gonna put one seed per three inch pot and the answer is no not even close i'm gonna put 30 to 50 seeds per three inch pot and now that might seem like crazy to you however it has everything to do with how the onion actually grows the roots of an onion are very coarse they're very wiry and so when the onions grow the roots themselves don't actually kind of tangle up with other roots they become very easy to separate when the time comes and so what we'll do as you'll see is we're going to take these these three inch pots here we're simply going to pack down the soil just ever so gently just enough to compress the soil create a really good soil bed to accept those seeds just press it down no harder than you might press on your eyeball with your lid closed just like that minus getting the dirt in your eye don't do that but you know no harder no harder than you'd press on your eye comfortably with your eye closed i do that just to compress the soil a little bit and that way it's going to have a really good seed bed to accept the seeds and then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to do something that you might think is crazy we're going to sew between 30 and 50 seeds per 3 inch pot that's right 30 to 50 seeds now you can go less and that's not a problem but we're going to be starting a lot of onion seeds because we have some to plant in our garden we also have some to give give away to friends and family and so between everyone i need to start this full flat of three inch pots and so i'm going to get roughly uh 100 200 300 400 seconds about 900 ish onion starts and when they all grow up what we're going to do to transplant them into the garden and we do have videos on this if you're curious and you think i'm crazy what you do is you simply take the pot out you simply take the the pot you dump it upside down with the plants they look like a big thing of grass basically and basically all you do is you take the the root ball you tickle it with your fingers to break up the soil kind of loosen the roots a little bit and then you simply hold on to the onion top the one that you want to select and just pull i like to work from the outside in don't grab the inside plant and pull out because that's going to be pretty tricky but pull the outside plant just yank it right out pulling outwards not up but out and it'll pretty much just untangle right from the root ball and you've got a plant but then you can take your finger poke a hole in your soil pop it in the hole about a half inch deep or so and then simply back fill and you're growing the onion will not have any ill effects whatsoever no root damage no transplant shock nothing onions are so hardy and they can be transplanted like this because of just how hearty they are and how fibrous the root system is and that way i can save a ton of space because to plant traditionally 900 seeds you might have three four or even five flats of uh of you know of trays of those like four cells or six cells you might have five to six trays of those just to get the same amount of plants and so i'm actually going to save a ton of space by putting them all into these three inch trays here and because there's no ill effects it just makes it way easier too all right so all i'm going to do is i'm going to take my packet onion seeds here i'm going to open it up and then i'm simply going to like i said make sure that the soil is nice and nice and level a little compressed and then all i'm going to do is i'm just going to take my onion seed and i'm just going to sprinkle it in the pot just like that between 30 and 50 seeds and we're all done now all we have to do is just take some compost and just sprinkle it very gently over the top obviously the last thing we're going to do is i'm just going to water these in now i prefer if possible to bottom water or i'll water with a very very fine mist or like a just even a mister a pump sprayer because i don't want to disturb the seed bed there's so many seeds planted in here that i just don't even want to i don't even want to scrape my hand over top to level everything off i typically just take my hand just just press it down just like that really gently just to make sure everything's you know nice and in place and then i'm just going to water this in really well make sure everything's nice and watered and in about a week they're going to start sprouting and then these are going to grow like this for about three to five weeks before we transplant them into the garden so after that they're gonna be good to go all right so there you go there's how i started my onions from seed i hope you all enjoyed i hope you learned something new if you did make sure to throw a like up there subscribe if you're not yet already and if you think a friend would enjoy this video make sure to share it with them i really appreciate that whenever anyone is willing to share our videos with a friend because uh you're entrusting you're entrusting their time with our video and uh it means a lot really does so i appreciate it and thank you guys so much for watching and i'll catch you all on the next episode all right grubby girl home everyone bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 67,806

Keywords: Premiere_Elements_2018, beginning garden, bulk, bulk sowing, grown from seed, how to, how to grow onions, how-to, howto, migardener, multi sowing, multisowing, onion, organic, seed starts, seedling, simple, sow, sowing, starting from seed, tutorial, walkthrough

Id: NTCxB4-dnmU

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021