SIX Foolproof Onion Tips You Probably Didn’t Know You Needed

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my Gardener Channel in today's episode I'm going to be giving you six onion growing tips you probably didn't know you needed let's go [Music] so a lot of you probably don't know this but I actually worked on an onion farm when I was in high school my cousins and I we grew up near one of the largest onion farms in Michigan and we did a lot of the weeding because as you know onions well maybe don't know but onions actually cannot be mechanized it's very difficult to weed in between onion rows and so what a lot of farmers will do because onions are very susceptible to weed pressure is utilize you know laborers hands and so that's what I was doing and when I was working on the Onion Farm I actually was able to pick up a lot of tips and tricks on how to grow onions just through working there and it was cool because I could apply them to our onions in our garden which was great and you probably have heard a lot of the tips that we learned through watching some of our older videos like how to grow giant onions and five tips to Growing better onions we've done a lot of onion growing tutorials throughout the years but in today's episode we're just going to kind of consolidate them down maybe bring up some old ones maybe show you some new ones and just talk about how to grow beautiful onions because I'll tell you what growing onions is probably one of the most rewarding crops that I can think of it is just such a versatile crop such a loved crop but also such a mysterious crop so many people have a tough time growing onions but they're not actually that tough when you really learn how to grow them so let's talk about them so the first tip to Growing onions is one that you guys actually ask a lot about and that's why the onions sit on the soil surface you see when we plant out our onions there's a special way of planting out onions so that the onions grow right on the soil surface they're actually supposed to grow like that and the reason why is because onions are a bulb and if the bulb is constricted by soil because it's buried too deep you're going to yield smaller onions onions are super susceptible to being squeezed and so the more compacted the soil is and the deeper they're planted the smaller the onions are going to be and so when we plant out our onions we actually I'll pull up a couple of our green onions to show you what we do but you can go back to watching us plant out our onions and basically how we plant them is we basically don't plant them any deeper than the white of the onion and when you have onion seedlings you'll see what I mean but when you plant them out in the garden you never want to plant any deeper than the white of the onion and that's one thing I learned when we're actually kind of beginning to start the the onion patch at The Onion Farm is they always had because we planted them by hand you never want to plant the onion deeper than the white of the onion so I'll show you what I'm talking about all right so we got some onions here some green onions and this will serve as a good example because green onions never really form a bulb so they'll kind of look like an onion seedling so regardless if you have a large onion like this you'll notice the white of the onion that is the neck of the onion now if this was a Seedling an onion seedling over time this would get large like that and you'd have the neck of the onion the reason why you don't want to plant it any deeper than the white of the onion is because over time that will actually push up in the soil and this is the bulb that you want to preserve same thing with some of these smaller seedlings here these little volunteers right check this out see see this look at that the white of the onion so because you have even a smaller seedling it doesn't matter right big small you can still find the white of the onion and you never want to plant it deeper than the white of the onion and so that's the first tip and that actually keeps it healthy and growing on top of the soil rather than buried too deep if you were to bury it this deep you'd have all of that below the soil it'd be very constricted so just the white of the onion now what do you do if it gets too top heavy well that's where you prune and that allows you to stand it upright still while planting only the white of the onion and that's what we did at the Onion Farm all right the second tip to Growing onions you probably didn't know you needed was leaving them in the ground until the very last second a lot of gardeners Harvest their onions too early and if you harvest your onions too early you're obviously going to have smaller onions now a lot of gardeners fear that leaving their onions in the ground will lead to things like rot and that's just not the case onions do not rot especially because they are they're kind of biologically geared to have their bulb preserved until the next season that's how it grows onions are a biennial and that means that if you left these onions here and never touched them what they would do is they would just sit in the soil and they would end up growing next year and then forming a flower which could produce onion seed and so onions are biologically geared to be totally fine being left in the soil and so as gardeners it's best that we just kind of let them do their thing now how do we know they're ready well the first thing is that they will start to get soft the neck of the onion will get really super soft and floppy it's no longer nice and you know upright right and so as the onion is growing the neck of the onion is what transports water and nutrients as well as sugars from the leaves back down energy to form the garlic or the to form the onion bulb right so as this is starting to form the neck of the onion is nice and strong but as the onion is getting ready to be harvested or ready to go dormant it will start to crimp and get soft that's the first thing you look for if your onions aren't doing this don't pull them out don't touch them also the onion Roots will start to rot and that seems like a bad thing right but that's actually normal that's what it's intending to do the onion roots are very very wiry and they're very prone to rod and as the season gets you know longer and it gets colder and wetter those roots will start to rot and it basically tells you that the onions are ready to be harvested because a lot of times the onions will kind of just tip over on their own right in the soil and you can basically you basically just pull them right out of the soil you know there's hardly any Roots left on these things and so that really allows you to tell when the onions are actually ready to be harvested versus when you think they're ready to be harvested so the third tip that you probably didn't know you needed when growing onions is they love lots of nitrogen so many gardeners make the mistake of feeding them lots of phosphorus because phosphorus is known to work with root development and flower development and so a lot of gardeners just simply throw down things like bone meal or triple phosphate or Rock phosphate so many different forms of of phosphorus but they actually like nitrogen and the reason why is because each ring on an onion if you were to cut this open there'd be multiple Rings each one of those Rings is a leaf on the onion and as those leaves wither and die they create the Rings which becomes you know the paper on the outside and the rings on the inside and then new leaves form from the neck and so as those leaves form you're actually yielding a larger onion and so the more leaves you can generate the bigger the onion is going to be and so the more nitrogen you can provide means the more Leaf growth you can actually generate and so don't Focus as much on phosphorus focus more on nitrogen give them things like we feed our garden with Trifecta plus that's our fertilizer of choice but you could feed them with things like blood meal you can feed them with things like fish fertilizer kelp meal lots of things that are very high in nitrogen even chicken manure stuff like that very very high in nitrogen helps generate that leaf growth and that is what's going to give you bigger better onions all right the fourth tip to Growing beautiful large onions is they like lots of water now onions do not like to go dry if they go dry they're going to die bulbs like all bulbs like lots of water and that's because onions are actually they plump up with water and so they're about 95 percent water if you let your onions dry out they will be small and they will be ready to be harvested sooner we went through a drought and these red onions dried out on me now again that was my mistake but look at the size difference these should have been about the same size as our wide onions our wide onions though were they were watered a little more frequently than our red onions were and look look at all these dinky little things so we obviously made a mistake but had we caught that mistake we wouldn't be left with these P diddly tiny little onions and so water your onions a lot I cannot tell you how often I see people saying that onions do not like lots of water because they're going to suffer from things like root rot yes onions are prone to root rot but if you have the right type of soil if you have a well-draining loose sandy loam soil like you should have it shouldn't be a problem to be watering them frequently the more rain we got throughout the summer the better our onions looked so just know that that the more water you can give them within reason the better they're going to be all right the fifth tip and this is one that is going to help a lot of you out is the difference between using seeds versus sets now seeds are the way to go and the reason why is because they will give you the largest healthiest onion that you're going to be growing and harvesting within one season you see these sets you probably get them in a bag of 5 10 or by the pound at your local Garden Center or hardware store you might even buy them online the down side to using onion sets is the fact that you're basically buying and planting a little dormant onion and that little dormant onion is a biennial and that biennial means that it's going to grow the second ear and focus most of its energy on flowering and because of that you're going to end up with a slightly larger onion yes but you're going to end up with an onion that is undersized from what it could be because most of that energy is going into flowering second thing is that when it actually forms the flower you then have to cut that flour stock off and use that onion much sooner because it will always have a green center in the center of that onion that will never fully cure like a bright brilliant white all the way through the onion if you're growing a white onion you cut all the way through you'll notice every single ring is white there's not a green center that green center is the flower stalk that will never fully cure and will eventually start to rot out the difference with seeds is the fact you're going to grow them as seedlings they're going to basically grow and mature in one growing season and you're going to harvest them that same growing season and so that's why I always recommend going with seeds they won't go to flour they will get a whole lot larger because they're not spending that energy on flowering and also you're going to have so many more uh you know options for plants you're getting one onion with one set right how many onions do you get in a pound when you're buying sets I don't know you might you might pay 10 15 for a pound of onion sets and you might get I don't know 20 30 onions okay but let's look at onion seed you can buy a packet of onion seed for two bucks from amigardner.com and you're getting 300 400 onions right because onion seed weigh a lot less and you get a lot more so you're not only yielding more you're yielding bigger and you're having more success so start with seeds not with sets all right in the sixth and final tip to growing bigger more beautiful onions is through pruning now you probably heard me talk at nauseam about pruning your onions and why it's so good but basically in summary pruning your onions helps to keep the weight off the neck of the onion if there's too much weight on the top it gets too top heavy and it falls over prematurely and once the neck crimps it's done and so during strong winds or heavy rain it can sometimes push the neck over prematurely because there's just too much weight and sometimes it falls over just you know because there is just too much weight and that will basically crimp that that neck and the onion now to prevent that you can prune we came through two different times this season Once when we planted the onions in the ground as seedlings and the other uh basically around early July we pruned off the tops so we had so we actually released that weight from the top of the onion and that allowed us to have the onions in the ground longer without them falling over so once the onion is ready to be harvested though it'll just naturally soften and fall over now a lot of gardeners fear pruning their onions because they hear so many other gardeners say don't prune your onions it'll lead to rot or it'll lead to water getting in there and and killing your onion or insects will get in find a home and kill your onion that way honestly a lot of those things are kind of unjustified and truly false now when you prune your onions yes you will have a little tube created temporarily and onion leaves are Hollow in fact let's make a killer good Bloody Mary straw look at that awesome but aside from a great Bloody Mary straw it's a hollow onion Leaf right and water and insects could in theory get in there temporarily but what happens after a couple days well they dry up they dry up and they close up see this is what happens right when we pruned our onions it's not Hollow anymore it's Hollow down lower on the on the onion but the tops right here look at this the tops all died and they basically closed up they died and they closed up there's no water that's going to be getting in there and maybe sure you know maybe a little a tiny little insect could climb in there but nothing that's going to cause that much damage and you're actually having a far bigger benefit to pruning your onions than you are the risk of them dying from rot or an insect or something like that so I would highly recommend pruning your onions yes you are still going to have people say don't do it the sky is falling everything is bad but I'm telling you for a fact if you try it you will benefit from it at The Onion Farm that we worked at there's a reason why we pruned our onion tops we went through the rows just like this with big loppers right pruners we went like this and we chopped the onions this is what we did all day and that's why I'm ripped to Mrs eye Garden I'm not as strong as I wish I was but that's what we did all day and that's pruning the onion tops there's a reason why we did it on 15 Acres of onions it's because it works and so I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you all learned something new if you did make sure to hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already we have so much more gardening content coming out this is just one of many more videos coming out this growing season and so if you're looking at growing bigger going home if you're looking at having a bigger healthier happier garden and having more fun in the garden make sure you join the family by subscribing and as always this is Luke from the Mi Gardener Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care bye views okay ouch I gotta balance my knees freaking ow it's so sore that edge I can't okay that's not working

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 49,879

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: ODQXfeJGfTE

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023