Pruning Onions [] Spooning Onions [] How and why to do it

well good morning welcome back to uh blue ridge homestead um today we're going to talk a little bit about and demonstrate uh pruning your onions and spooning your onions as you can see our onions are doing very well they're very tall and they're starting to to break the leaves of them are starting to break off that could be due to high wind or could just be due to they get so tall and fall over so one solution to that is you come in after your onions have been planted i'll say 10 weeks or so or you can do it if a big storm comes through and it knocks all your stuff down so what you want to do is you come in you grab all of the foliage up in your hands and trim it off say six inches tall so you you know cut about that much off of that particular one and uh i'm not gonna throw these away we're gonna save them they go you can use them in soups you can freeze them you can freeze dry them if you have a freeze dryer you can dehydrate them make onion powder out of them scramble them up in your eggs there's a lot of different uses for them don't just throw them away you can make your uh chicken stock you can throw them in that vegetable stock if that's what you choose but each one of these onions you're going to want to come in and just trim them off about six inches tall and like i said don't do this unless they've been planted about 10 weeks or so or unless the storms came through you want the bulbs to be getting a decent size these here a lot of them are inch and a half two inches across and so they're getting to the point where they're they're needing to be trimmed just a little bit and you're only going to have to do this one time usually unless they just take off and go for it again so you're just gonna go through and like i say just grab the foliage up all the way from the bottom up pull it up clip it and i'll get the camera closer here in a second and demonstrate exactly what i'm doing here but your onions are going to want them all about the same height and it won't hurt them they'll continue to put out the new foliage they'll put out a lot of growth to the bulb they won't be so focused on growing the green stuff but yeah it's very beneficial to the onion itself to do that it can keep them from prematurely snapping the neck on them which when onion is ready to be pulled from the earth you got your your bulbs here and say your onion tops like this it'll actually about you know right next to the bulb it'll just snap off or not all the way off but it'll disconnect and fall over that's how you know they're ready to pull that they've done all they're going to do as far as your onions go so we'll just continue to do this until we get about the whole bed done and then we will get closer and show y'all exactly what we're doing so stick with us we'll be right back alrighty so to show you more close up how we do this you're going to go from the bottom of the plant pull the foliage straight up with your fingers roughly six to eight inches trim it you just you're going to do that with every plant if you're not exactly right on your measurements it'll be just fine like i said you save save the tops i guess you consider this your first harvest off of your onions and uh another thing is when you got them plant planted close like this this gives you a good opportunity to get inside of the in between them and pull the little weeds out that may have grown in there you just continue on through the bed until you're all the way completed it's very simple your onions will well your onion bulb size is what's going to benefit from this because the plant is going to put a lot of energy into growing that bulb now you want the big wide onions that you can you can really uh slice cover your whole hamburger that kind of thing this is one good way to get them onions are a heavy heavy feeder heavy feeder of nitrogen i mean everything on this plant is green and typically if everything on it didn't quite get that one short i want typically if everything on the plant is green it needs nitrogen now you throw nitrogen on the grass in your yard it gets greener grows vigorously same thing with onions same thing with your your kale caught your uh broccoli cabbage some of your lettuces look like a potato coming up in there look at that just never know what might be in your compost so you see they're mostly all the same height like i said there's a few that are going to be a little longer than the others so you just continue trimming and like like i said before you don't want to do this too early you want to make sure they're 10 12 weeks along and the bulbs are really starting to get formed before you prune these back so now this whole bed is pretty much done we got a pile of green onion tops make some fine onion powder you can get in there pull out any weeds you wasn't able to get to ain't too many in here so i will reposition the camera and we'll get right into the onion spooning okay so your onions you want the bulbs you don't want the roots exposed you want the bulbs to be exposed so spooning is basically an old term i'm assuming the old timers would take probably a spoon such as i am doing right now and you're just you're just removing the soil from around the onion just trying to keep that bulb as free as possible to expand outwards because onions do not like to be under the soil and pressured because they'll just grow straight up and down and then you'll have really long onions which i guess is okay but i try to put the soil in between the onion plant and kind of row it down through there occasionally i'll have too much i'll scoop it out put it in a bucket take it to one of my other raised beds and put it in there i won't ever throw it out just because it it's so hard to get good soil and once you got it you don't want to just toss it in the garbage but as you can see these bulbs here plenty free from the ground [Music] there's a few in there that i'll have to move some soil but for the most part i have removed enough soil on in there to keep them plenty happy not sure if y'all can see how much that's raised up right through there that's a good sign that your onions need more space so just kind of get in there and like i say spoon them after you get done topping them off or topping them however you say it you can see how much how much onion is hidden under that soil this just alleviates a little pressure on that bulb and allows them to expand outwards and provide some really good large slicer onions so another method you can use for uh spooning your onions or if you just want to call it what it is removing soil from around the bulbs of your onions you can just take your finger and go around the edge of the bulb and kick the soil out from away from it very important do not expose the roots of your onions you want to make sure that they're well intact you can see these onions are definitely well rooted to the soil that's one thing i was always careful with is not disturbing the roots they definitely don't like that so yeah that's that's kind of the gist of it as far as pruning and spooning your onions you're just topping them all to about the six eight inches and they'll shoot up some more green stuff typically you don't want to trim them again just let them do their thing till fall or whenever you want to pull them and uh should do really well for you i hope uh hope you all enjoyed the video got something out of it learned something maybe and uh we'll see in the next one so until next time uh lewis and sally for blue ridge homestead and we're saying come join us on instagram we got a facebook group and if you like this content subscribe to our youtube channel and until next time again this is lewis and sally for blue ridge homestead saying come grow with us you

Channel: Blueridge Homestead

Views: 46,951

Keywords: Planting, Onion, Onions, Pruning, Garden, Raised bed, Self sufficient, Vegetables, Veggies, Spooning, Homemade, Homestead, Homegrown, Farm, Gardening, DIY, Grow, Growing onions, Harvest, Food, Groceries, Organic, Green, Grow your own, Flavor, Green onion powder, Free seasoning

Id: h_Qfp1hQJCg

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022