The 2 Most Important Tips for Growing Big Onions

Today I want to talk about growing onions and what are the two important keys to growing those nice big onions so onion plant will grow just about anywhere you could take an onion plant and throw it on bare dirt not even cover it up and it would eventually take root and start to grow but how do we get those big soft ball sized onions that we all want so the first important key is time of planting you want to plant those onions as soon as you can so you can get as much growth as possible out of the window for that particular onion variety onions have kind of two growing stages you've got the vegetative stage or what I call the investment stage and then you've got the bulbing stage or what I call the payoff stage so in that initial phase or that vegetative phase you want to make sure you get as much leaf growth on that onion as you can each one of the leaves on that onion plant is going to represent a ring on that onion bulb so the more leaves you get the bigger the bulb you're gonna have so planting those onions early is important to maximize that vegetative stage and get as many leaves as you can so that a payoff in the end so for us in the south the ideal onion planting time is late November and that's when I planted these here behind me so as soon as we can get plants from Dixondale that's when we want to plant our onions so here we grow two varieties onions we grow the Texas legend and the red Creole now in the past I've grown kind of equal amounts of both but this year I'm growing a lot more of the Texas Legends and just one row of the red Creole now I like the red onions but they're a little more prone to bolt and they don't seem to store as well so for the purposes of storage and having onions for a long time for growing more of the Texas Legends this year now to the second key for growing those big juicy onions which is feeding onions are heavy feeders which means they like plenty of water and plenty of fertilizer so that's why I plant my onions on drip tape so I can give them plenty of water and plenty of fertilizer so before I planted these onions I came in here with my drip tape layer and laid my drip tape on two foot row spacing I like that two foot spacing because once those onions get larger I can just make one pass those double rows with my single wheel hoe and it makes it really easy to cultivate it and keep it clean after I have my drip tape laid then I planted in my double rows of onions I like using double rows because I can get two rows of onions per one row of drip tape really helps me maximize the space in my garden along the road I like to plant my onions pretty close i spaced these about four inches apart and they'll need some thinning if we want to get really big onions and what we'll do is once those onion bulbs get about size of a quarter or size of a half dollar we'll come in here and harvest every other onion along that row and use those as green onions we'll leave the rest of them to form those real big bulbs that we want so back to the feeding we can feed these onions in two different ways the first way is through injecting fertilizer in that drip irrigation system so early on in the life of the onion we'll inject our 20-20-20 through that drip irrigation system now onions when they're young needs some phosphorus and potassium because that's going to encourage root development as they get older they just kind of need nitrogen so that 20-20-20 helps early on by injecting that in they're getting some good root development and also giving a little bit of nitrogen to kick started now as those onions grow we'll switch to a fertilizer that's just primary nitrogen something like our Chilean nitrate and we can inject that to the drip system as well or we can also side dress with it if we want a little slow release action for side dressing I'll just take that Chilean nitrate and sprinkle it alongside that onion row there and then I'll come behind him with my wheel hoe in the cultivator teeth and kind of incorporate that into the soil and that gives us some nice slow release fertilizer for when we get a little rain now as I mentioned earlier it's really important to maximize this vegetative or investment stage of the onion plant so giving it plenty of water through that drip irrigation also giving it plenty of fertilizers through the injection or through the side dressing is going to make sure we get as much vegetative growth as we can during that initial investment stage now when it comes time for that bulbing stage or that payoff stage as I like to call it we're gonna have plenty of rings there on that onion and plenty of water to make sure we get that nice big juicy onion that we want so plant your onions early feed your onions well and you'll have a nice big crop when it's time to harvest hope you enjoyed this video we'll see you next time

Channel: Hoss Tools

Views: 1,596,543

Rating: 4.8424888 out of 5

Keywords: onion, growing, dixondale, farms, texas legend, red creole, short-day onions, onion planting, planting onions, drip tape, drip irrigation, drip hose, drip watering, best onions, growing onions, onion fertilizer, feeding onions, weeding onions, harvesting onions, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, sustainable living, homesteading, homesteader

Id: Y9mvA21dAns

Length: 4min 54sec (294 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019