THE PERFECT TIME TO FERTILIZE ONIONS!

so this is the time in the onion growth cycle when you really need to be making sure they got plenty of nitrogen however you want to do that whatever fertilizer you want to use what's up Lazy Dog fam hope everybody out there is having a wonderful day it is Friday January 20th here in South Georgia kind of a chilly day out here I'm just on the verge of going inside and putting on a long sleeve shirt but I'm gonna try to tough it out at least for this video so on today's video we've got our onions here behind us need to check on those I want to show you how those are doing how they've recovered from the Arctic blast we had several several weeks ago probably need to side dress them give them a little bit of nitrogen and then we're going to head on over to the raised bed garden where we got some things that didn't survive the Arctic blast it didn't come back that great I'm gonna try to fill in some gaps there and plant some more stuff in our raised bed garden now after the Arctic blast these onions behind me here look pretty rough the tops are brown they're kind of laid over I was confident pretty confident that they would recover and they have did lose a few plants but not any major major losses and didn't really touch these plants or this plot until just a few days ago I wanted to let them kind of naturally recover make sure they had plenty of water but I didn't want to disturb them until they were able to kind of recover start putting on some new green growth now I did come in here about two days ago and finally weed this plot a little bit and it started looking pretty rough so I got in here we did this still some weeds popping up in there here and there probably need to weed it again in the next few days but it's looking a lot better than it was just a few weeks ago so let's take a little closer look here these first three rows are the ones we planted kind of in early November we got the Chianti red variety got DP suite and Timon over there and you can see they look nice and green and healthy again a big turnaround from what they look like right after that Arctic blast and on these three rows you can see we've got a few little gaps in there but for the most part we have nice full rows we did lose a few plants here and there we've still got plenty of onions in these double rows now these two double rows here where we have the Georgia Boy and Sterling varieties were planted several weeks after those over there and you can see they're good bit smaller and we had a lot more loss in these two rows than we did over there not quite enough loss to just scratch it and you know plant something else here still got enough plants in there we can see if we like these two varieties or not but definitely got a lot more gaps along the rows there now back to these first three double rows so these plants are probably not quite as big as they would be had we not had the Arctic blast but I like what I'm seeing here leaves are nice and dark green and putting on a lot of new growth getting some nice long leaves here now one question we get a lot during onion growing season is about the tops doing this number right here when they get so long they just kind of start bending falling over a little bit sometimes you'll see them laying on the ground like that right there and people think they need to do something about this they need to maybe trim these or keep them from laying on the ground but you don't need to do anything at all just leave them alone they're fine if you're getting some nice growth like that to the point where they're bending that means you're doing a good job so don't cut these don't mess with them at all just let them grow so compared to other vegetables onions need a lot of nitrogen especially to make those dense heavy green tops that we want to see as these plants grow now usually when I'm growing onions I would side dress them with a nitrogen only fertilizer two sometimes three times during the vegetative phase which is what we're in now but we had our chicken tractor on here a pretty good bit before we planted these onions and I was hoping that would allow me to kind of minimize my nitrogen applications and I think it is so so far we've only fertilized these onions with a pre-plant fertilizer some 855 and we ran agar Thrive through the drip system a few times but really haven't supplemented with heavy nitrogen yet now I don't have any way to test the nitrogen levels in this plot right here to tell us if they've got enough to make it the distance or if they're going to run out of juice here in the next month or so and need a little more all I can do is kind of just go by I feel go by experience go by the look of these plants here and by the look of these plants I don't think they're going to need a ton of extra nitrogen so instead of two or three side dressing applications of nitrogen the chickens have made it to where I think we can get by with just one and we're going to do that here in a minute so this is the time in the onion growth cycle when you really need to be making sure they got plenty of nitrogen however you want to do that whatever fertilizer you want to use but once they get established like this putting on new leaves that's when you really want to feed them heavily during this vegetative phase so we've got some nature safe 1300 here which is our preferred nitrogen source and hopefully everybody knows by now fertilizer works a lot better if you bring it to the Garden of the dogs bucket got this two quart scoop and we'll use two scoops per double row so we'll go along each side of the double row with a scoop and then scratch it in with a wheel hoe my life I've been searching for the right ways to keep myself from looking down [Music] [Music] all right all right all right we got them fed and we got them weeded all in one effort there so let's get some rain tomorrow which will help to start dissolve that organic fertilizer there so we can start feeding these plants now if you recall back to the video we did late last year talking about our top 10 onion growing tips one of those tips was to stop feeding the onions when they start the bulbing phase now we're still a ways off from the bulbing phase on these and we'll be able to easily tell when that happens because the soil will start cracking around those plants we'll start to see that bulb of the onion forming there now one of the things that's always kind of puzzled me a little bit is how do we stop fertilizing these onions when they enter the bulbing phase especially when we got kind of a constant supply of nutrients in the soil with these slow release fertilizers not like I can just come out here when they start bulbing flip a switch and they're no longer getting any notch so I think the whole stop fertilizing and bulbing practice which is a good practice to have applies more to fast acting synthetic fertilizers so once these onion plants start bulbing we won't want to come out here and give them a good shot of the blue stuff but with these organic slow release fertilizers like I said there's no way to really turn off the switch I think it's going to be okay we just wouldn't want to give them any additional fertilizer once they start bulbing now over here in the raised bed garden we've got some stuff that made it come back after the Arctic blast and some stuff that didn't in this round bed or charred that we had planted on this half here didn't really make a comeback we need to scratch that we'll probably plant something else right there on the next video our beets made a pretty good comeback they're still kicking along still a ways to go but they recovered nicely I thought our Savannah mustard might make a comeback and a few of the plants did but there's not a whole lot there just enough to make you mad Pak Choy made a little bit of a comeback there we can probably salvage some of that right there for a meal but we're probably going to end up cleaning this out pretty quick and planting potatoes here in the next month and then for our parsnip bed here the established plants we had the ones we planted first most of those made it not a real full row but enough to leave it over here where we had replanted some not enough to right there we probably just need to scratch that and plant something else right here so since my first planting of Savannah mustard bit the Dust for the most part and we've got a rose worth of space open in that parsnip bed I figure well might as well plant some more Savannah mustard now would be a good time get some in the ground while it's still cool we can have a lot of good greens going in the spring they'll bolt once it gets hot but we should be able to get several good harvest if we plant some right now and this Savannah mustard is usually a variety that I don't recommend direct seeding just because the seeds can be a little bit pricey a lot of the Old Timers around here for their fall Garden they'll just till up a spot get them a pound of mustard seed and just go stroll it out there in that tilled soil that's their fall Garden you wouldn't want to do that with a savannah Mustard Seed I usually grow this from transplants in the greenhouse but since we're working with just a small space today we're going to direct seed it because I still got quite a few seeds left in this bag now I'm not going to amend this little space with some of our homemade compost just for a small replanting of mustard like this probably wait till the parsnips are done most are probably be done by then and it will amend the whole bed before we plant a warm season vegetable here it's really all I need to do is make a couple little small furrows on both sides of this drip tape this buried here so here's my tape right there you can see it and then just makes a little tiny Furrow on this side here and then make another one on that side there because we're going to plant this stuff pretty thick now we've got our furrows made we just need to sprinkle some seeds in there not going to get too exact with this just kind of lightly sprinkle them in there I'm not going to plant them maybe as thick as I would plant carrots but I'm trying to get a seed at least you know a couple seeds every inches there so we got one side of the double row done now we'll do this side here I didn't use hardly any seeds at all for that I still got a bunch of seeds in here oh spilled some right there that spot's gonna be a little thick but that'll be all right now we're just going to lightly cover these up we don't want them planted too deep pack it in a little bit and hopefully the rain we get tomorrow isn't too heavy it doesn't wash away any of these seeds and they should get up and going pretty quick so my greens consumption sadly has been quite limited since the Arctic blast but hopefully this planting of Savannah mustard will help us solve that help us get more greens back into our meal rotation from week to week these things are usually ready to harvest in just about 30 days and if we can get some of these days in the low to mid 70s they should pop and won't be too long before we'll be cutting some good greens now I know I was the only one that lost a lot of greens to the Arctic blast so let me know in the comments Below have you replanted already you planning on replanting are you just waiting for the warm season plantings to come around or maybe you're in the middle of the northern part of the country and you're thinking about planting some greens pretty soon so I hope you enjoyed the video today and as always you can find links to our affiliate Partners in the description below got some coupon codes for some of those companies you can take advantage of those discounts don't forget to go check our website lazydogfarm.com where we now have our fig trees for sale we've also got our garden blog recipes recommended products hat shirts all kind of good stuff over there if you did enjoy the video be sure to subscribe hit that 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Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 21,486

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: -YMCr6vfL80

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023