THE BIG SECRET to GROWING BIG ONIONS!

so it's growing around a quarter inch or a half an inch a day and the stem still feels firm on it so ain't no telling how big this thing is going to get what's up Lazy Dog fam of all you are having a wonderful day it is Wednesday March 22nd here in South Georgia feels like spring again out here we're in the low 80s today and that means I need to get caught up on some planting got some cabbage and broccoli transplants in the greenhouse that are way overdue gonna try to get one more round of those planted but before we do that we're going to check to see if we got any Frost damage the last few nights and I also want to show you just how fast our onions are growing so earlier this week we got down to 31 one night and then 35 36 another night I wasn't worried about most of this stuff out here just a few things you can see we've got that bed covered and this one over here first let's check on the things that we didn't cover the potatoes here we did Mound some soil around these plants which seemed to help got a little bit of burn on some of those leaves there but pretty minimal damage so everything looking good with our raised bed taters and our in-ground taters way over there now I was a little bit worried about these snow peas here but they look just fine this taller variety here which I think is called blizzard doesn't seem to have taken any damage might have got a hair bit of leaf burn on this variety which is that blue shelling pea and now that we're back in the low 80s we can take this covering off our little baby pickles here should be okay they still look a little rough from that time we didn't cover them a week or so ago but hopefully they'll recover if not we can just replant and we can go ahead and take the covering off this bed as well where we have some summer squash planted and those look really good about time to thin those out a little bit so we feel fortunate that we didn't receive any significant damage from that last little early spring Frost I know not everybody was spared I saw a picture from one of our Facebook followers who's in south Louisiana further south than we are and his taters look pretty rough so now there's warmed back up around here we need to get these beautiful transplants in the ground right over here in this Blank Space we have between our onions and garlic but before we do that let's check on our onions and garlic so I feel like it was only just a couple weeks ago when we did a video out here on this plot showing you how our onions had just started bulbing they had just started kind of enlarging there at the base of the plant so what I'm about to show you now has happened in a matter of 10 to 14 days so we have quickly went from onions that were just starting to bulb to that right there onions about four inches in diameter and they don't look like they plan on stopping anytime soon so let's take a little closer look at some of these this is our red onion that we planted a variety called Chianti and it's just starting to bulb I could see the ground crack in there before I pulled the soil away so that one still has a ways to go we can tell how thick the neck is there that that's going to end up being a pretty dang big onion now in the second row we've got a variety called DP Suite which is one we grew last year performed really well for us last year and from my experiences last year this is one of the earlier maturing varieties amongst the five different varieties we have planted and I've been keeping my eye on this particular onion over the last few days and it's crazy how fast it is growing just a few days ago this onion was about three or four inches in diameter right now it's about five or six inches in diameter so it's growing around a quarter inch or a half an inch a day and the stem still feels firm on it so ain't no telling how big this onion is going to get now in this third row we've got a variety called Timon we grew this one last year as well this is a round sweet onion and last year this one didn't get as big as the DP sweet onions I don't expect them to get as big this year either but we're starting to get some nice round onions there so not the size that we'll get from the flat DP sweet onions but these round onions will store a good bit better so the size of onions you make will depend on a lot of different things fertilizer water just how the weather's been but it's also a variety thing some varieties just make bigger onions than others but what I'm about to show you this comparison is going to show you the importance of timely planting so these two rows right here where we have a variety called Georgia Boy and then a variety called White Phantom I believe we're planting about two or three weeks after these over here now these onions that we planted later have started to bulb as we see down there because bulbing is triggered by day length in onions so those have already started bulbing and we can look at the difference between the foliage or the leaf size on those we planted earlier versus those we planted later huge huge difference there so we're going to get a lot bigger onions over here we've got a lot more leaves bigger leaves than we are over here where our leaves aren't near as big so timing is very important but it's not everything for example there's a guy down the road about five miles who plants his onions before I do every single year plant some out there in front of the road he's always the first one around here to plant onions now his have already started bulbing and I can tell just by riding by that they're not going to be very big onions and I told Brooklyn the other day when I saw how big the leaves were he didn't get enough fertilizer to those onions so timing is important but it's also important to give them the nutrients they need having the chickens on this plot for a couple months before we planted our onions is going to make us look like we know what we're doing and had these plants not gotten laid flat To The Ground by that Arctic blast we had right before Christmas there's no telling how big some of these would get so the moral of the story is plant your onions on time and feed them well now if you're in Nebraska I can't tell you when you should be Planting onions I only know down here for our area through experimentation but if you're unsure when you should be Planting onions I would say stagger a couple plantings one year and see how they perform that should give you a good idea of when the perfect timing is and then as far as the feeding goes just work under the assumption that there's no such thing as over fertilizing onions yes I'm sure it can be done I've never done it now we didn't fertilize or supplement these a whole lot here because the chicken manure was feeding them pretty well we only side dressed them one time with 1300 but just work under the assumption you can't overdo it on onions feed them feed them feed them if you want big onions now while these onions are looking great this garlic over here is just nah just looking okay not really sure why it's gotten the same treatment as those onions have same way we grow garlic every year using the pine straw worked really good for us last year a good bit of my soft neck garlic didn't even come up at all not sure what happened there we're still going to get a bunch of garlic from this plot here just the plants aren't quite as big as I would expect them to be this far along now my plan was to put some watermelons in this pot at some point but I'm not quite sure when that's going to be I was going to start my watermelon seeds in the greenhouse this week these onions don't look like they're slowing down anytime soon so I think I'm going to hold off another week we'll be late getting our watermelons planted but they should still do just fine so since onions are going to be a little longer we might as well fill this Blank Space right here try to see if we can get a fast crop of cabbage and broccoli out of it so we've already got a drip system in this plot and we've actually got it running right now because you can't give onions enough water when they're in this bulbing phase so we're laying it to them right now but having a system already in place will make things pretty easy for our planting today I just need to go find me a couple old drip lines under the barn we can reuse put them down right here hook them up to that main line and we should be good to go foreign so we did our little fad system there we made a Furrow amended the furrow with some nature safe 855 and then added some drip tape in the furrow I've got the drip tape on now and I put these rows about three foot apart I wanted to kind of stack them in there tight that way if this stuff is not done when these onions are done I can kind of work around this little space right here as far as my watermelon planting goes let's talk about what we got as far as our transplants go so we've got some Chinese cabbage here some savoy cabbage some green magic broccoli and then some Imperial broccoli now these probably could have went the ground a couple weeks ago we started having those cold spells made me a little nervous with these baby transplants so we waited that might have been a bad decision they're starting to wrap a little bit there as you can see so might have a little bit of transplant shock but we'll just see what we get so this drip tape here has a 12 inch emitter spacing I can see one right there one right there and one right there I might could plant this Chinese cabbage a little closer than 12 inches apart but it's just going to work out easier with our emitter spacing here to do it on a one foot spacing so grab one of our little transplants here that one there's a little dry put it right beside that emitter and cover it up a little bit there grab a nerding right here and I'll probably do half Chinese cabbage have savoy cabbage on this row and then split the two varieties of broccoli on that second row all right all right all right we got him in a 30-foot row of two different types of cabbage and a 30 foot row of two different varieties of broccoli now this is definitely not my favorite time of year to be growing cabbage or broccoli once it starts getting hot broccoli heads can get seedy in just a matter of days cabbage can also bolt pretty quick once it warms up around here in mid to late spring but since we have the transplants we had the space it's worth a shot so I hope you enjoyed the video today be sure to check out our affiliate links in the description below and go check out our website lazydogfarm.com and let me know in the comments below if you're starting another round of cool season veggies right now or are you just focusing on planting warm seeds and stuff and if you want to know more about how to grow big onions be sure to check out this video right here we break down our top 10 tips for how to grow big onions and I promise you if you follow these 10 tips you will grow some big onions so check that out and we'll see you next time right here at Lazy Dog Farm

Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 38,234

Keywords: backyard gardening, organic gardening, sustainable living, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, homestead, homesteading, homestead garden, organic food, small farm, sustainable agriculture, home garden, sustainable farming, sustainable food, organic garden, backyard garden, home gardening, garden advice, garden tips, garden techniques, gardening tips, garden seeds, garden varieties, gardening, garden, how to garden, grow your own food, kitchen garden, clean food

Id: HO73dTF3p9s

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023