Time To Start Onions From Seed - Everything You Need To Know - Long Day Short Day - Sets vs Seeds

okay my friends here it is the video that's gonna explain to you everything you need to know in order to successfully start onions from seed and why you should so let us get right into it because the time has finally arrived so the first thing we have to understand is the difference between starting onions from seed and from sat s onion sets are those little tiny onions that you get from the seed or the feed store and they already look like onions you plant them out into the garden and they will grow up yes but here is the issue with onion sets you often have problems because onions are a biennial which means that their first year they focus on vegetative and bulbing and then their second year they focus all their efforts on flowering and producing seed which that is not what we want we want the bulbs and so uh that is why a lot of times when people plant onion sets they have all kinds of issues with many of them flowering or maybe you'll have a bunch of little ping pong ball sized onions and the onions that you do get from set will never store as long as onions from seed because they're already in their second year of growth so for that reason if we want the nice biggest densest tastiest onions that store the longest we must start it from seed so they are in their first year of growth now the second thing that we have to understand is which onions do I use because there are what is called short day onions and long day onions also intermediate day which I'll explain but for the most part the distinction is short and long day now what does that mean short day onions produce all of their vegetative plant mass as the days are getting shorter and shorter and shorter then as the days start to get longer it signals to the plant to begin bulb formation so short day onions are typically planted over the winter time in the Deep South long day onions are they produce their vegetative growth as the days are getting longer and longer and then once the solstice comes and the days begin getting shorter it signals to the plant to begin bulbing and so that is a very important distinction many people will plant the wrong type of onion in their space and they will have a bunch of marble or ping pong sized uh onions okay so we find out where you're at and to help you here's this chart okay so here's a map find where you live on this map and you will see that technically anything south of North Carolina Tennessee Arkansas Oklahoma half a New Mexico Arizona and California as well anything south of that is technically the short day onions but here's the thing guys short day must be planted in late summer to harvest in early spring they're grown over the winter time so for the North or the intermediate day those you grow plant into early spring like we're going to be doing now so find out where you live and if you have any doubt then I recommend an intermediate day onion for best results okay so now that you know where uh you are and what type of onion you should be growing I'll show you what I'm growing this year obviously I'm in Northern Indiana so we have the long day onions and so I will this year I'm going to be planting the weather's field red from Baker Creek which is a great one I still have many of them in the basement they're rock hard from last year I'm also going to be growing the yellow of Parma this will be my first time growing this one but I've heard good results so remember the more pungent the onion the the longer it will store the Spanish sweet or the vidalia type onions the sweeter the onion the less amount of time it stores so if you want them Rock Solid onions those real eye-watering pungent onions that last all winter long you want to get the most uh pungent kind that you can because it is this sulfuric compound in the onion that that burns the eyes and all of that that helps it to store that keeps it fresh okay but now those these are both distinctly long day onions the yellow of Parma and the Wethersfield red but here is one that I recommend to most of you and that is going to be the Australian Brown and it is an intermediate day onion so it can straddle the line if you're only going to choose one if you're if you're not a hundred percent positive on where your zone is then uh use the Australian Brown because it's very forgiving it's an intermediate day so it's uh it can kind of straddle both and it stores all winter long I still have many of them in the basement and it's a very delicious onion so this would be the one I recommend to most people okay so that all of that being said let me show you the best way I have found to plant them okay my friends we're gonna start with the two tray system here the top one has holes and the bottom one does not we put them inside of each other like that and that's what we'll use to bottom water the next thing is I like to pre-moisten the soil so we're going to put the soil into a receptacle and then we're going to soak it really good and uh saturate it until when we squeeze it the water runs freely like this that's when it's at a good point now we're going to place it inside of the tray now we want plenty of soil put it pretty much right up to the top because they're going to be in here for a long time and we want those roots to have as much soil as possible and I like to tap it down a little bit and then for this one we're going to use the yellow of Parma onion seeds now onion seeds are the number one seeds that go bad quickly you need fresh seeds each year they're very thin and they do not they oxidize quickly so you want fresh seeds for best results and we're going to put the entire packet here and that's 300 seeds don't be concerned that it's all super close together it will be perfectly fine and then we're going to spray it down with the water like this so that everything is nice and moist and then we're going to cover them with about a quarter of an inch of soil real gingerly and yes you want to cover them okay some people say not to cover them but I highly recommend to cover pretty much all seedlings seeds but definitely the onions it will help with germination and everything will be better so then we're going to give it our final watering like this so that everything is nice and moist always label your seedlings guys you will not remember I know you think you will but you won't so you label them and then put them on the heat mat and set the thermostat at 77 degrees links are in the description if you want to get this heat mat thermostat combination but always remember to put the the thermostat probe into the soil and that will keep it at a nice 77 degrees okay so now here I'm going to tell you some very important things now you're up to this point and within one to two weeks you will begin to see the Sprouts if you're using the heat mat and it's set at 77 degrees if you're not using a heat mat and it's just ambient temperature then it can be anywhere from three weeks to a month or more before you see sprouts and many of them might not even Sprout that's why it's critical that we have a heat mat to Aid in the germination we set at 77 degrees and forget about it now the next thing is that you must use a timer for this this is why I made the video before about the seed starting setup a timer is critical because the onions will detect changes in the day length so you cannot be off some days and on the other days they will it will wig them out so we set the timer at 16 hours on and eight hours off and we leave it like that their entire life okay so for the next phase of their life I'll make a video about it but when we go to plant them see they're gonna grow out of the tray like pencils and then when we go to plant them we will just pull up a whole chunk and gently shake it apart the roots of the the onion plant are very very robust kind of like spaghetti and so we can just gently shake them apart and we get each onion so it's not a problem that they're all crowded together onions can grow like that no problem then when we go to plant them we'll shake them apart and we will space them out appropriately at that time so stay tuned for that video alright my friends if you feel like you gained something give it a thumbs up leave a comment first thing that comes to mind share share your thoughts also share the video with whoever can utilize this knowledge and get the onions started guys you got about two more weeks of leeway two to three weeks but you want to be starting the onions as soon as possible

Channel: Garden Like a Viking

Views: 21,743

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Id: SvwqXns9iHQ

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023