MY TOP 4 TIPS | Growing Big Onions

hey guys just real quick I want to apologize for the wind but today is the onion video so as you can see I have a lot of onions growing in my garden this year if you're new to my channel the 2020 garden season for me is all about growing all the staples my family needs for the year and onions is a huge one of those I recently did one of my videos where I started the process of managing my onions so I can get the really big nice Bowl being onions but I figure it's really important a lot of people are struggling growing onions I know I was the first three years of gardening I couldn't get anything bigger than a ping-pong sized onion until last year where I completely changed up the way I was growing onions and that was the ticket so I'm going to talk to you about there's really four major tips I guess I have to share about growing onions and then I'll take you along for some of the processes on how I maintain my onions as they grow so that I do get those really nice big onions so probably the first thing that I'll share with you is there are two ways to grow onions and a lot of people choose to grow onions from what's called a set and you buy them like in a bag or in bulk and they're like they look like baby little onions or you can grow them from starts either start them yourself from seed or by starts already started for you there is no rain coming it's just really windy so when I first started I always picked up the bag of sets and come to find out what that is it is a second year onion you're not gonna get an onion from that you're gonna get green onions and great green onions if that's what you're trying to grow but you're not gonna get your big slicers or your storage onions so last year I bought starts from last year I either bought from Johnny seed or Seed Savers Exchange I can't remember this year I bought from Dixon Dale Farms who is probably the most reputable onion farmer in the United States with a spot with respect to distribution so if you're looking for growing large onions you will not get that from sets you have to grow it from starts now typically when you buy sets from a distributor there are nuts excuse me starts they're going to come with the tops really trimmed back and you're gonna see these onions are nowhere close to being ready but I already have some top heavy growth happening here you see and I learned something new recently that each stem growing on your onion plant represents one ring growing around your onion and one of the key ways that you know when an onions ready to be harvested is when at the base of the plant where the neck is it falls over it basically separates from the onion you're gonna get that prematurely if you don't trim back your onion tops so around 10 to 12 weeks after you've planted your onions out you're gonna notice this and that is not what we want so I plan in my onions I'm trying to think probably late March and it is now the 1st of June so what you're gonna do is just trim these back six to ten inches or no excuse me about four to ten inches from the base of the neck and the great thing about these stay tuned another video coming your way you can eat them of course fresh who doesn't like that but you can store them all kinds of great ways the last bet I did I just sliced them all up put them in a gallon size freezer bag fresh to basically fresh to add to soups stews anything that you're making that would call for green onions chopped with the rest of these my plan is to dehydrate them and make my own onion powder I wouldn't want to waste my good onions for that my story and onions so will we will make some green onion powder basically you can see what I'm doing here I'm topping them off that's what it's called topping your onions it's going to make sure that the onion itself the plant is forcing that energy that growth energy to the bulb itself it's not overburdening the neck of the onion so I'm going to do the rest of those and we'll come back with what the next step is that you should do for big onions so that's what my bed looks like now after I've talked to them off hopefully that gives you a good idea of what you would be going for one point that I should make is you don't want to do this too early you want to wait till because the plants do need the greens for good just plant health and growth and establishment but once the bulbs start forming which is usually tend to tweak 10 to 12 weeks after you've planted it you're going to cut those back and you probably only have to do it the ones I don't actually know that I've ever seen anybody do it more than once I suppose if you had they continued to grow and you had a big windstorm that prematurely knocked them down you could trim them back again but let's move on to my favorite thing it but it is the hardest and most tedious task when it comes to growing onions at least for me onions at this scale it wouldn't be too tedious if you were just growing you know 50 or so onions but that's something called spooning I've already done four of six beds two weeks ago when I planned on trimming back my tops then I don't know if you guys can tell but the soil here where my peppers are planted is a bit taller than the soil around the onions and that is because when you do what I'm going to show you called spooning you're removing soil around from where the bulbs are growing and growing in a raised bed it can get kind of tricky to figure out where to put all that soil so let me maybe go to a bed where I haven't done it yet and I'll show you what spooning looks like okay so I have not done this bed yet let me just get rid of a couple weeds in this bed almost all my onion beds I am growing carrots and onions together they're a great companion plant and you can continue to bury if you've ever grown carrots before so many times I lose like the top inch of my carrot because it gets exposed to the Sun and what I do enjoy about growing the onions and carrots together is I can move some of that soil around the base of the carrots and they do just fine so these obviously haven't been topped these were of all my onions this bed in the bed behind me had the smaller sets on them so they just grew at a slower pace but let me bring you down here and show you what you're gonna do I'm gonna move this carrot out of the way so here's the base of the onion and basically what you're gonna do is you're gonna dig away from around the onion just until the roots are holding on and get that give that bulb room to expand onions do not do not like to fight for growth room and so you might find yourself with a bunch of extra soil like this and then I just sprinkle it around the base of my carrots and you're gonna do this continuously as your onions grow immature I would say I probably did it every ten days or so as my carrots were growing and this again is called spooning your carrots I don't know why it's called spooning other than maybe old farmers took a spoon out with them to the garden and see here's a two itty-bitty one I'm not even gonna bother doing this one it's just not ready but eventually you get to a place where you need to just move soil out of your way especially when you're growing in raised beds because there's just not enough room to put all that you don't want to expose the roots like that when I just pulled back too much and expose the roots if you saw my planting on the onion video this is one of the primary reasons I said I don't plant my onions too deep like I just packed the roots tight because it's far less spooning than if you plant them super deep you've got so much more dirt that you're having to manage around so here you can see this is the bed the pepper bed that we were in you're gonna see how the bulbs are getting nice and big now I've spooned away from them and I've moved the dirt towards the center of the bed and you're just going to come out here and periodically check and make sure that you know the soils not either been washed down tight around the bulbs they're not getting challenged still yet and just keep it to where just the roots are still underneath the soil okay I do see some on the other side of the bed though that are getting challenged so let's walk over there so these are getting pretty the soil just watch how I'm just spooning that away again from around the base of the bulbs you always want to keep your roots still under but if I can't clearly see a a round bulb on top of the soil I know I need to do some work to it okay probably the last tip right so tip number one was how you start your plants tip number two was trimming them or topping them off tip number three spooning tip number four is onions and this is the most important if you do nothing else you'll still get something decent onions are heavy heavy feeders and you've got to water them well so last year I'm all out of it but last year I just used organic chicken manure they're heavy nitrogen feeders at least once the bulbs start growing they can tolerate a good phosphorous feeding while the greens are growing so heavy nitrogen feeders and you need to feed at least every two to three weeks this year I'm using just an all-purpose fish fertilizer and it's time for me to fertilize them again Dixon Dale recommends of course kind of crop planting so you've got long rows of crop a pathway in the middle and they recommend ammonia sulfate as the fertilizer I've just never gotten my hands on any so just something that is a very very good rich fertilizer so I am NOT gonna bore you guys with this is a long process that's something that you need to know if you want those big beautiful onions you've got to put the work in as a gardener so I still have one two three four more beds to top and a check on spooning on four of them and then I've got to spoon what needs to be spooned and one of them for the first time so guys come back because I'm super excited this year I'm harvesting more than ever out of my garden using all the things that other years I might have looked as as just compost and chicken food so these green onions we're gonna turn into some amazing onion powder so come back for that and yes we've got our next HOA garden tour series coming up this weekend so I can't wait to share that with you guys talk to you guys later and thanks for watching hey and if you liked this video and you enjoy spending time in the garden with me I'd invite you to go ahead and subscribe hit that Bell notification so that you can get alerted when we put out new videos thanks guys and I'll talk to you later [Music]

Channel: That 1870's Homestead

Views: 1,133,121

Keywords: how to grow big onions youtube, should you top your onions, what to fertilize onions with, growing onions, growing onions in raised beds, growing onions in michigan, how to start growing onions, how to know when onions are done growing, how to harvest green onions so they keep growing, why are my onions not growing, how do you know when onions are done growing, homesteaders of america, best homesteading youtube channels, best gardening youtube channels

Id: SmR71HTOV9A

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020