Hi and welcome to my garden today. We are going to
be talking about onions and specifically growing onions in Florida and what is the best way
to start your onions because there's lots of options out there like sets, starts, and then,
of course, seed. So, let's play in the garden. So, before we get to what is my favorite way to
start onions in the garden, let's talk about a few things that you need to know about onions.
So first the timeline for starting onions is kind of very similar to garlic in that you do want to
start them depending on which way you're starting, whether you're starting from seed, which
is typically around the September time frame. Starts which are around the November time
frames, and then sets about the same time November or December or shortly after. And you may be
wondering what are sets and starts. Of course, I think we all know what seeds are. The plant
will produce a flower and the flower will produce seeds and those seeds are what we use to
plant lots of different kinds of vegetables. But onions also come in a couple different ways
that you can purchase them. Another way that you can purchase them is something called starts.
Starts are a very small baby onion plant. So typically, what it has is a very tiny bulb on
the end and then some green growth at the top. It's almost like what you would expect to see from
bare root strawberries or bare root potato slips. Very similar to that in that it's a very immature
small plant. Normally they're not in dirt. Normally they are wrapped up with the roots
exposed. Sometimes they're wrapped with peat moss or wet paper towels or something like that
but they are what we would call an immature onion plant. Somebody has planted them from seed
and they have grown just a little bit. Enough for you to transplant them in your garden.
Now sets are a little bit different. Sets are plants of the onion that have already started
to bulb. So, on the bottom what you get with a set is an actual little tiny bulb. Whereas starts look
more like green onions, sets look more like a very young onion. It's just seeds, starts, and sets
are just different life cycles of the plant. So, it all starts with a seed and then those seeds
turn into starts or what looks like a green onion or a very young green onion and then they start
to bulb and that is what a set is. On top of determining which one you want to grow set,
starts, or seeds, you also have to determine what area of the country that you live in to determine
what type of onion you can grow. So, there are short day, long day, and a midday or intermediate
day. These right here are an intermediate day that I started from sets. The intermediate day, I
thought might work here because they said it works everywhere. It does not work in Florida
and I’ll show you in just a moment why that is but really the short, intermediate, and long day
is based on how much sun that the plants are going to get throughout its life cycle. So, a short-day
onion is going to get 10 to 12 hours of sunlight a day, an intermediate is about 12 to 14, and then
the long day onions can get 14 to you know 16 or even 18 if you're all the way up in Alaska but
it really is dependent on how much sun you get on a typical day. The sun is what determines or it
tells the plant when it needs to start forming the bulb. So, if you get a long day onion and you
put it in a Florida garden where we typically get 11 to 12 hours of sunlight a day depending on
the year it will never bulb because it's waiting for that 14, 16, 18-hour day long sunlight
and that just isn't going to happen. Now the name is a little bit deceiving because short day
versus long day doesn't mean that you're going to get them in a shorter period of time or it's
going to take longer for your onions to bulb. It really has no distinction on the timeliness of
the onion. It has to do with the day length. So down here in Florida we grow short day. You really
don't have to buy a bunching onion type to get a green onion. In fact, I use these as green onions
because they're never going to bulb. They are the most giant green onions you'll ever
use but they taste just like green onions. After they've reached that green onion phase where
it has a little bit of a white stem and then the top is nice and bushy and green what you'll start
to see is the bulbing starting to take effect and it will start out very small
almost to where you can't see it and then the bulbs will grow rounder and
rounder and bigger and bigger and they grow actually on top of the soil for the most part.
Sometimes you have to pull the soil away to get a really good look at them and it doesn't hurt
anything to do that. In fact, a lot of people like to pull the dirt away. It's called spooning
and they like to pull that dirt away from the onion to keep that onion from having any
hindrance of growing bigger and bigger. Once you've got them in the ground. Once you've
got them to that start phase then you're going to really want to start fertilizing these guys and
they're not super heavy feeders I haven't found. Not like garlic or corn but they do need to
be fed so fish fertilizer, garden tone, maybe every two weeks when they're young and
then as they get bigger, like these guys, maybe once a month. I mean I haven't fertilized
these in probably three months and they still grow just fine. They don't need a
lot of help once they get big. Now let's talk about the pros and cons of
the various types of onions like set, starts, and seeds. So, for sets probably the best pro for
sets is that they grow very fast. I mean they're basically already a bulbing onion so all you
have to do is put them in the ground and within a couple of months they are going to be full
onions. Now the cons are that sets are more expensive than starts or seed by far. Also, the
varieties are very limited. In fact, I could not find a short-day set. I’m sure that they exist
but I could not find any short-day onion sets that I could use hence why I use the intermediate
or midday onion. The other problem with sets that you might encounter is sometimes the set or
the bulb is actually the second-year bulb and what I mean by that is that onion plants
are biannual that means the first year they grow big green and bushy the second year they flower.
When they flower, you're not going to get a good onion bulb that you can use for storing
and cooking. Now you could still use them. They're completely still edible but they're not going to
store as well. They're not going to get as big; they are going to get a little woodier, those
kinds of things and you don't know when you get the set if it is actually a first year set
or a second-year set. It’s never specified so you could go through all that trouble, pay all
that money for a set and end up with a flowering plant with onions that won't store or like what
happened to me. I got a midday that will not bulb so taking up room in my garden. Thankfully
my family loves green onions so we've been using it for that and I actually have been
pulling these guys out and using the root that is there which isn't much of a
root. I’ll show you one right now. As you can see, I’ve got a tiny bit of bulbing
here but this is not what you would expect from an onion. An onion should be round. Also, the
top should fall over and die out and that's how you know when to pick them. These guys will never
store but what I like to do with them is I like to use the tops as green onions and I like to chop
up the bottoms put them in my dehydrator and make onion powder out of them which is I’m going to
make lemons out of lemonades or onion powder out of midday onions. So, there are still things that
you can use them for and they are still edible but sets in general are a risk depending on where
you live. Most of them are long day, some of them are intermediate but you know like I said it's
unlikely that you're going to know whether they're a first-year onion or a second-year onion and
equally unknown whether they're intermediate, long day, or short day so for my vote sets
are not the way to go. The next type of onion way that you can start onions is starts. Now the
pros of starts are once again you're getting a speeder time. Not like sets but they will be
faster because the seed growth phase does take a long time. I mean months longer than a set
or a start. A set will get you like I said a couple of months you're going to have onions. A
start it's going to be more like three to four months that you're going to have onions which is
still great timing. The other thing is locating starts. I found some easy short day starts in my
local nursery or even at a big box store. They're actually much easier to locate but you have to
be looking for them at a certain time of year which is the time that they're going to go in,
that's November December even January time frame. The negative about starts is they're not as
expensive as sets but they are more expensive than seeds and there is a limited amount. You're
going to get a bundle and those bundles might have 20 to 30 that are viable. Sometimes you get
a lot in there that are not viable or they're dead already. You still try to plant them and
see what happens. Most of those died off on me but the ones that were nice and green and had
good root systems did very well but for the money they’re not the best pick. The third way is you
could start from seeds which is number one pro, they're the cheapest. You can get hundreds of
seeds for a couple of dollars and you can grow a year's worth of onions with
just a couple dollars for seeds which is awesome. You know that you're
getting a first-year onion because it's seed. You know that you're getting a short day or a
long day because they all have the variety types on them with Granex being a great one for down
here in Florida which is a short-day onion very similar to the Vidalia onion but then
the other issue is the cons of growing from seed. Onion seed is fickle. All seeds trying
to germinate seeds can sometimes be a challenge for any gardener even an experienced gardener.
So, getting them to germinate properly, keeping them wet, keeping them moist
to the moisture that they like, getting them past their young stage where they
have very wispy greens on them, to getting them to the start phase takes a long time. So, another
con for seeds is that they do take a lot longer timeline and by a lot longer. I’m talking six to
nine months depending on the variety. Do you have space in your garden to set aside that amount of
time? Do you want to wait six to nine months to get onions? So, these are all factors into why
you may or may not want to start with sets, starts, and seeds. If you want to know my personal
favorite, I think that starts are the way to go. They are not as expensive as sets.
They're not as cheap as seeds but you get to harvest faster. You know
exactly what kind of onions you're getting. You know that their first-year onions. So,
in a lot of ways they are no-nonsense. You really don't have to do much with them.
Stick your finger in a hole, stick the plant in the ground, cover it back up, fertilize them
once a month as you would the rest of your garden and you're going to have tons and tons of onions
but if you want a challenge start them from seed because that would be my second favorite way
would be seeds but they do take a lot longer, you are going to have to dedicate an area
of your garden for a long period of time and you are going to have to baby
them out of that seedling stage and then, of course, my last or least favorite,
probably influenced by this situation, is sets. So, there you have it. You have my favorite way
to grow onions which is starts and I hope that you take this as an opportunity to give onions
a shot in your garden because they are super easy. Make sure to hit that subscribe thumbs up
button so you don't miss any of my future videos.
