TOP 10 ONION TIPS | How to Grow Big Onions!

and number nine this seems to be the one where there's the most misinformation out there don't what's up lazy dog fam hope all you guys and gals out there having an incredible day this is a video i've been itching to do for a while but i just had to wait until the time was right so today we're going to be talking all about onions earlier this year back in in mid to late spring when we harvested our onions we gave a few of our onion growing tips but today i want to really dig into those tips a little bit and give you my top 10 onion growing tips and then we're going to plant some onion seeds here in the greenhouse so we've got our seed trays laid out here we've got our onion seeds we've got our plant markers but before we do that let's get into these top 10 onion growing tips that we've kind of compiled over the years from our experiences growing onions and these tips should be helpful for everyone no matter your climate no matter wherever you live in the country however when applicable i will state specific examples about growing onions down here in the south because that's the only place i've ever grown onions so let's dig in number one you gotta pick the right day length variety for your area so onions have two distinct growing phases they have the vegetative phase then they have the bulbing phase in the vegetative phase they're making all green top there in the bulbing phase they're not making any more green top they're using all their energy to make that bulb larger make your eventual onion that you're going to harvest now the initiation of that bulbing phase in onions is triggered by day length so if you plant the wrong kind of variety for your area your onions may bulb too soon or they may never bulb at all now we have a map on the blog on our website but i'll also throw it up on the screen here so you can see it as you can see if you're in the southern part of the country you need to be planting what they call short day onion varieties if you're in the middle part of the country you need to be planting what they call intermediate day onion varieties and if you're in the northern part of the country you need to be planting long day onion varieties now if you're kind of between those defined boundaries say right between long day and intermediate day you can probably plant either type same thing if you're on the boundary between short day and intermediate day you're probably safe to plant either so planting the right type of onion for your area whether that be short day intermediate day or long day is going to ensure that your onions bulb at the right time and you maximize the size of that onion that you end up harvesting tip number two grow your own onion plants if you can if you already have a seed starting set up if you're already growing some of your own plants for your backyard garden definitely grow your own onion plants now onion plants are not that expensive they're relatively affordable so i don't know that it would be advantageous to buy a whole seed start and set up just to grow onion plants but if you already got it set up definitely try to grow your own plants now there are several advantages to growing your own onion plants the main one in my opinion is that you get to pick the varieties you want to grow if you're buying plants you can only grow the varieties of that plant grower produced for you to buy but if you grow your own plants you can go online find all kinds of different varieties for you to try another good reason to grow your own plants is that the plants are never really stressed so when you buy onion plants those things have been out of the ground for a little while they're kind of dried up they may be shriveled a little bit and when you put them in the ground it's going to take them a little while to come out of that kind of dried state start growing again but if we go straight from the greenhouse here straight from a seed tray to in the ground our onion plants will take off a little faster and they don't have that little stress period there where they've been out of the ground now we'll grow our onion plants in these deep proptech 10 20 trays here but you don't have to be real particular about what you're using to grow your onion plants you could plant them in a big pot and just thin them out separate the plants and then transplant them in the ground you can do it in big sail trays small cell trays i like these because they have these nice deep cells and it makes it easier for me to keep the onion plants separated and kind of cingulated okay number three you got to plant at the right time now this is where my lack of mobility over my life is going to keep me from giving all of y'all some really good information here but you want to make sure you plant at the right time for your area now for us down here in the south november is the ideal time to be planting our short day onions i've planted early november mid november late november anytime in november you're going to be good now i've also played around with planting them a little earlier than november and some years i haven't had my onion plants ready and i planted as late as december now when i planted early say late october it just seemed like the timing of the onion grow out didn't work out like it was supposed to some of the onions bolted really early on me i had some rotten in the ground and so i don't really try to plant early anymore i stick with november now the years where i have not had any plants ready or something like that and i've planted later in december i still get some decent onions but they don't get quite as big as they would have gotten if i would have planted them in november so november is ideal for me down here in south georgia if you're in the middle of the country or the northern part of the country it's obviously going to be much different you won't overwinter your onions like we do you'll plant them the following spring or maybe late winter but i would say play around with it a little bit you know have enough onion plants for you maybe can stagger the plantings and see what might be the perfect the ideal time for you to actually get them in the ground and number four which kind of goes back to the choosing the right variety part of the equation from my experiences hybrid onion varieties significantly outperform open pollinated onion varieties now obviously if your goal is to save seed from the onion plants you're going to need to grow an open pollinated variety to do that but most people are trying to prevent their onions from bolting because they store a lot better when they don't bolt so in that case i would highly recommend going with a hybrid we did a lot of trials we've done a lot of trials over the years did quite a few last year for instance last year we compared a variety called timon that we'll be planting again this year to the texas early grano 502 aka texas legend so both of those are sweet yellow round onions so kind of the same type of onion and the tamale and the hybrid significantly outperformed the 502. in past years i've grown the 1015 onion which is more of a flattened sweet onion and the hybrid varieties like the dp suite we're going to plant this year do significantly better than that variety did for me another example would be with the red onions i've grown red creole before it does okay but this chianti onion we're going to be planting later this hybrid variety significantly outperforms something like red creel so those first four tips had more to do with picking the right variety and when to plant the rest of these tips are going to have more to do with actually growing the onions and we'll be sure to walk you through the process as we plant and grow our onions all the way through the winter and into the spring so tip number five when you transplant your onions into the ground so in our case when they go from the greenhouse to the in ground garden we want to make sure we give them a balanced fertilizer initially that's something with relatively equal parts of n p and k doesn't have to be exactly equal we'll be using some nature save eight five five that's obviously not the same number all the way across the analysis board there but it's close enough you want to give them plenty of phosphorus and potassium because that's going to encourage some good root development initially so try to pick something that's somewhat balanced to put in the furrow when you're transplanting your onions in the ground number six once your onions get going a little bit you really gotta shoot the nitrogen to them onions are heavy feeders and they like a lot of nitrogen in that vegetative phase where they're producing all that grain growth so after we transplant our onions we're giving them that balanced fertilizer at transplanting when we start seeing them put on a lot of new green growth there that's when we're really going to shoot the nitrogen tool now there's obviously lots of different options out there as far as a straight nitrogen fertilizer if you don't care about being organic you can use something like ammonium sulfate or some other kind of synthetic nitrogen formulation we'll be using the nature safe 1300 i like it it seems to work pretty quick for an organic fertilizer i've also taken out the nesting box out of my chicken tractor and kind of sprinkled that along the rows if you've got access to some animal manure that would work as well number seven onions are thirsty they like plenty of water especially in that vegetative phase and that's why we almost always grow our onions on drip tape irrigation that way we can just keep them fed so just grow and grow and grow and maximize the vegetative growth during that vegetative phase so early on when the onion plants are small assuming no rainfall i would run the drip tape for two three maybe four hours every other day or every three days even throughout the winter when it's kind of cool when things aren't drying out as much as the onions get bigger and bigger closer to maturity a lot of times i'll run that drip overnight several times a week and they'll just drink it up so be prepared to give your onions plenty of water obviously you don't want the soil to be super saturated because then things can rot but you know have things set up or you can give them all the water they need number eight stop feeding the onions when they start bulbing now this is a question we get a lot how do i know when my onions are bulbing and you'll know when your onions start bulbing because you'll see the ground start cracking around that onion plant as that bulb starts to enlarge and a lot of times as it enlarges it will kind of push the soil away and start kind of emerging a little bit above the ground so it's pretty obvious when bulbing starts happening if you're concerned that bulbing hasn't started happening or has started happening it probably hasn't happened yet you'll know it when it happens but whenever that happens don't give them any more fertilizer now they're not devoting any energy to green growth they're devoting all their energy into making that bulb larger and number nine this seems to be the one where there's the most misinformation out there don't cut the tops of your onions or maybe i should clarify that don't cut the tops of your bulbing onions so if your goal is to grow a nice big onion bulb don't cut the tops on them as i explained earlier onions have two distinct growing phases the vegetative phase and the bulbing phase i want to maximize the grain growth in the vegetative phase the more grain growth we have the more photosynthesis we can get going on to make a really nice bulb if we compromise that vegetation i'm not going to have as much photosynthesis taking place we're not going to get as big of a bull so if you're wanting green onion tops whether that be for soups eggs garnish whatever grow you some spring onions or grow you some bunsen onions cut the tops on those because those onions aren't being grown for a big bulb don't sacrifice your bobbin onions and number 10 you got to keep the weeds under control onions especially for us down here in south georgia are in the ground a long long time so we're transplanting these in the ground in november we won't harvest them until the following you know late april early may so you're looking at six months there about half the year that's a long time to really stay on top of the weeds in a particular row in your garden but you got to do it because there are some bad consequences if you let it get really really grown up and i know this because i have had years where i have lost control of my onion patch and just got really really weedy on me so what happens when your onion patch gets really really weedy one all those weeds are gonna rob all those nutrients that those onions need like i said onions are heavy feeders you've got weeds in there that are sucking up those nutrients as well the onions aren't going to have what they need and they're probably not going to be as big as you're going to want them to be come harvest time the other thing about things getting too weedy and this has happened to me as well is when you get a lot of weeds around your onions especially when they start bulbing it can create this kind of moist damp environment there and it can cause the onion bulbs to start rotting so you don't want a lot of weed growth up around those onion plants when they're bulbing because it's going to make things too wet down there you'll lose a lot of your onions because they rot so that's it that's my top 10 onion growing tips i wish i could give more planting time information for those folks in the middle of the country and the northern part of the country but i've never grown onions in those regions so i can't really speak to that but i promise if you follow those 10 tips you should have a pretty good onion harvest so now let's do a little planting so we got three trays we got three different varieties all varieties we grew last year that did really well for us we got chianti which is a red onion we've got this dp suite here which is a yellow flattened organic style sweet onion and then we've got timon here which is a yellow round sweet onion now all these are short day varieties which means if you're in the middle of the country or the northern part of the country you don't need to be growing these varieties that also means that whatever your favorite onion varieties are up there i can't grow down here now my original plan was to only plant these three varieties well the other day i was online scouring around trying to find that making variety and that sweet azalea variety that i've told you about on a couple of the past videos still haven't found anybody who has seeds for those but i found a couple more varieties that i just had to get so i found another short day variety at nec.com that's where we got these called georgia boy i was like well i got to try that one never tried out before got to try one called georgia boy right and they also had a white onion i can't remember the name of it but i got a pack of those as well i haven't gotten those in the mail yet i'll plant them when we do so today we're just going to be planting these three so let's start out by getting some pro mix in these proptech trays here i can't ever remember how many cells are in these trays i know they have a 10 20 footprint i think it's in the 230s i want to say 238 233 234 something like that but i really like them for onions and leeks that's pretty much all i use them for so you know i don't know if it was that wise of an investment to get trays that i'm only using kind of once or twice a year but i like the deep cells in them the only place i know that carries these is greenhouse megastore has them there if your seed starting system is standardized to more kind of 10 20 tray size stuff these are nice because these fit your 10 20 bottom trays you already have stuff like that all right so we got our trays full now let's whip these down a little bit get that seed starting mix moistened all right so we got that seed starting mixed nice and moist in there let's go and put our plant labels in here and then we'll start the lengthy task of making some small dibbles in each one of these cells okay we got that done that'll about give you carpal tunnel if you do too much of it there let's start out with our red onion variety our chianti and if you didn't see these onions last year just how big they got you can go back our channel or better yet if you're watching on youtube i'll put a link in the description below so you can see just how big these were now onion seeds are tiny and so don't drive yourself crazy unless you're just limited on seeds about making sure you get one seed per sale because they're really easy to thin out later at planting time so we just want to make sure we get at least one seed per cell but if we get multiple no worries we've also had several people asking us if there's anywhere to get these varieties in smaller quantities unfortunately on nec's website all they have is a thousand seed quantities and a lot of people are like well i don't need that many but it's not that bad of a deal it's only 10 bucks for a thousand seeds what i recommend doing is just grow out a tray of them find your neighbor or two a friend that wants to grow some onions take what plants you need sell a bunch of them to your neighbor for five dollars sell a bunch of them to your other neighbor for five dollars and then you have paid for your onion seed and you're good to go another thing onion seeds can be a little temperamental as far as holding their germ rate well from one year to the next so i had some seeds left over from last year but i didn't want to plant them and then they take a little while to come up a week or two i didn't want to plant them and then wait on them not to come up and then kind of be behind on my schedule so i went ahead and got some fresh seeds for this year even though i had a little bit left over from last year that way i knew these seeds were freshly germ tested and they should sprout well for us okay chianti is done we got two more trays to do okay we finally got all the cells planted now let's top them off with a little perlite go dogs just make it easy for them little onion seedlings to emerge keep things being too wet on the surface there and then we'll water them in now i should note that with my watering system here my fertigation system i watered those onions with just straight water didn't water them with this stuff and the reason for that is because i recently added a pretty heavy dose of agar thrive in that bucket there because some of these brassica plants look like they need a good little shot so i didn't want that to inhibit germination usually if i got a low dose in there it doesn't seem to bother anything at all but because i stepped up my dose a little bit i moved my siphon hose just into this clear water bucket and that's what i'll give those onions while i've got a pretty high dose of fertilizer in that bucket so now we wait now these onion seeds usually take at least a week to germinate if not closer to two weeks so they do require a little bit of patience initially but once they get up and going they're pretty easy transplants to grow and starting them right now in the middle of september will give us six weeks until november now we don't have to plant them right at the beginning of november but that'll give me plenty of time i think i'll have a nice onion transplant by then so i hope you enjoyed the onion tips and onion seeds starting if you've got anything to add to those tips please do put that in the comments below also if you're in the middle or the northern part of the country please share your experiences as far as ideal onion planting times that way our other viewers who may not be as experienced can read those and really learn from you and also if you want to see these 10 onion tips in written format you can go to our website lazydogfarm.com we've got a blog there i think it's called top 10 onion growing tips it's got a picture of brooklyn holding those big red chianti onions you can go there and look at that for more of a written format of these 10 tips if you're watching on youtube make sure to check out our affiliate links below a lot of great companies that we use in our gardens here at lazydog farm even got some coupon codes for some of those companies so you can take advantage of those discounts if you did enjoy the video be sure to subscribe hit that notification button like and share and we'll see you next time right here at lazy dog farm [Music] by the beauty of your life

Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 28,484

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: RfHqDlZmEb4

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022