WE GREW A 3 POUND ONION! | How Did We Do It?

so you kind of got away the pros and cons there if you're going for storage you might want to grow these as your sweet onion as opposed to the flattened ones what's up Lazy Dog fam hope all y'all are having an outstanding day it is Tuesday May 2nd here in South Georgia and it's finally time to call it a season on most of these onions here behind me so we're going to talk about how you know when the onions are ready to harvest we're going to talk about how to cure and store onions and then we're going to kind of give an assessment of these five different varieties that we grew over this past winter so we've got five double rows of five different short day onion varieties that we transplanted back in November you can see the weeds are starting to get the best of us a little bit as we've been busy working in some of our other garden plots it's finally time to get most of these onions out of here start getting this cleaned up so we can plant some watermelons so first let's talk about how we know when onions are ready to harvest so I'll give you three different signs of how you can tell so sign number one they start falling over like you see with those right there we got three or four that's falling over and that double row and several over there that have fallen over two now sign number two isn't quite as obvious as sign number one but it's pretty easy to tell when it's happening so you can see in this row this one here has fallen over this one here hasn't fallen over we can see how the leaves are starting to die back some and if we fill of the stem down here at the bottom we can feel it's kind of weak so for whatever reason it hasn't fallen over when the leaves start dying back like this it's pretty much ready to harvest and then the third sign which I can't really show you because none of my onions are doing it would be if the onions start flowering now flowering is something we don't want to happen because it usually means the onion won't store very long but some sometimes it does happen so if your onions start flowering it's best to go ahead and pull them eat them as soon as possible they're usually not going to store very long now these red onions in this double row the Chianti variety they still look like they've got a ways to go they're not really showing any of those signs we just talked about but we're seeing at least one or two of those signs in these other four double rows now if you've got plenty of time you've got plenty of garden space and you're not needing to get your onions out so you can plant something else like I am you can wait until each individual plant Falls over or the leaves start dying back in my case I need to get these onions out of here I need to get these cleaned up so we can plant some watermelons so I'm going to go ahead and harvest all these even though a few of the plants along the row are still standing so I'm going to go ahead and pull four of these double rows we'll leave the red onions for the time being I'll pull them lay them out on the grass We'll have each variety separated then we can talk about how we cure and dry the onions all right so we got four of those double rows pulled there left the red onions for the time being and yes that is a heap of onions but I love growing onions and so I always just plant a bunch of them just because it's fun all right so after you've pulled your onions what you want to do is lay them out single file you don't want to stack them all on top of one another they won't dry that great that way so lay them out in a row like we have there you can do this on the grass or you can do it right in the plot there's many years where I'll just pull the onions flip them up lay them right on the dirt there I need to get this cleaned up for some watermelons so that's why I'm laying mine on the grass if you are going to lay them on the grass like this make sure your grass is cut don't lay them in some real thick grass because you'll get a lot of moisture from Dew and stuff like that so I cut my grass yesterday knowing that I was going to do this today so lay the onions out in full sun like we have here that's what you want and pick a window of a few days when you're not going to have any rain I was going to do this late last week but then I got looking at the forecast and it said we were going to get a bunch of rain this past weekend which we did and so I waited until today because it looks like we're not getting any rain for the next four or five days now if your onions are ready to pull and the rain is just Relentless you can do this like for instance underneath my barn over there it will just take a lot longer for them to dry and cure that way I have cured them underneath the barn ideally though this is the way I like to do it now how long you leave them out here will vary a little bit just depending on how mature your onions are some of these that have already fallen over might dry out a little quicker than some of these that hadn't fallen over but what we're waiting to see here is we want to see these root ends here get nice and crispy almost to the point where you can just pull them off the bottom of the onion there and we want these tops to dry up and get brown so we don't want to see any green on these tops and want to see nice crispy Roots there and hopefully in the next few days once these onions dry and cure out here in the sun on the grass I can show you what they're supposed to look like before we put them in storage so stay tuned for that we'll try to throw that in on another video later this week so now let's do a little variety comparison here because two of these varieties we grew last year two of these we've never grown before so up top there we've got the DP suite and then in that second row we've got the Timon onion grew both of those last year down here we've got the Georgia Boy those are those flat yellow ones there and then we've got this white onion called White Phantom so first year growing Georgia boy or white Phantom so all of these varieties including the red Chianti onion that we haven't pulled yet are bred by a company called DP seeds and I believe that stands for Dependable proven seeds so to the best of my understanding DP seeds is a breeder so they develop varieties and grow out seed crops and then wholesale those seeds to online seed retailers who put them in smaller packages and sell them to folks like me and you now DP seeds has a company from what I understand called nec's online I think it's necs.com that's where we get our seeds from so we're not buying these wholesale we're buying them online from nec's and I don't have have any kind of affiliate relationship with this company I don't get paid to mention this company I just know they have some really good onion seeds the owner did send me an email last year and say hey I appreciate you spreading the word about our seeds but that's the extent of our relationship now I've never grown anything but they're short day varieties so I can't speak on their intermediate day or long day offerings but I would presume those are pretty good as well so let's start by looking at this DP Suite variety which grew these absolute monsters you see here now in the onion game they have different words to classify different sizes of onions you've got medium onions you've got large onions you've got jumbo onions then you've got colossal onions and then I'm creating my own category for these These are what we call monster onions now this variety I believe is classified as a granix type onion which means it's somewhat flattened now it's not as flattened as the Georgia Boy variety I'll show you in a minute but you can see it's not round and it's kind of flattened there and so this variety performed really well for us last year performed even better for us this year I think it had a lot to do with all the chicken manure we had on that plot there so if you feed these things well you'll make some monster onions now if there was one downside to this DP sweet variety it would be that a small percentage of them will split like we see right here now sometimes this happens because I don't thin my onions real well when I'm pulling them out of the seed trays and I accidentally plant two onion plants in one spot so sometimes that's my fault Sometimes some varieties do it more than others I would say about four or five percent of my onions look like this right here now we can still eat these they probably won't store very well and they look kind of gnarly so just expect that with some varieties of DP sweet variety does seem to give you a few more splits than some other varieties so the next variety we have here is called Timon just like the character on the Lion King and this is a round sweet onion so you can see this one's shaped a lot different than the DP sweet onion I showed you just a minute ago these don't get quite as big as the DP sweet onions do but we did pretty good with these this year we did good with them last year we're having even more fertility in the soil gave us even bigger onions this year these three right here are a little bit bigger than a softball so some nice round sweet onions now the next variety we have here is Georgia Boy our first year growing this variety now we planted these a couple weeks later than the Timon and DP sweet varieties they weren't near as big when that Arctic blast hit right before Christmas I didn't think these were going to come back but they did so that's why these are a little smaller than those others had they been planted at the same time they'd probably be closer to the size that we've got on those DP Suites so this is what I would call a true granix style onion you can see how flat those onions are this is what most people would refer to as a vidalia onion nice flat sweet onion there and considering what we dealt with planting these late the Arctic blast killing back the plants to the ground I think we did pretty good with this variety I think this variety is definitely a keeper and then lastly we've got our white onions here this variety called a white Phantom first year trying this variety it actually been a few years since I grew any white onions so I was kind of glad to add them back to the rotation these were planted late kind of like the Georgia Boys so we dealt with some struggles with these early on but we ended up making some pretty decent sized white onions now from my experiences white onions will never get as big as some of those granix type yellow onions but that one there's about softball size these other two are kind of between a baseball and a softball so I'm not mad about the results on these and I think this variety is a keeper as well so really nothing to complain about with any of those varieties I mean if we want to get nitpicky we could complain about the splitting on the DP Suites a little bit but there just wasn't enough splits for me to worry about I think the size of those onions outweighs the few that split so now let's talk about something that I think is very important to know when you're choosing the onion varieties you're going to grow and that is storage potential so not all these onions will store for the same amount of time some don't have a very long storage potential some have a pretty decent storage potential so I just went and pulled one of these red Chianti onions because we'll start there so it has been my experiences over the years that red onions have the shortest shelf life you want to use these first we'll be pickling a lot of ours that's a great way to preserve onions but I usually don't get more than a couple months storage out of these so we try to use these or preserve these first because they usually don't last very long even if we dry them and cure them properly like we'll be doing so next on the shelf life scale would be our yellow sweet granix or flattened type onions you can see here the differences between the DP suite and the Georgia Boy onion the Georgia boy is a lot more flattened than the DP Suite is so these onions will store a little longer than the red onions will but they don't have a particularly long shelf life you want to use these within a few months of harvest now from my experiences the flatter the onion is the sweeter it's probably going to be but also the shorter the shelf life is going to be so DP Suite will probably store a little longer than this one here this Georgia Boy which is really flattened and then next on the list we have our yellow round sweet onions so these are going to store longer than the red onions and they're going to store a little longer than those flattened sweet onions I can usually get about three months maybe a little more storage out of these before they start going bad under the barn now these these won't be quite as sweet as those flattened onions that I showed you earlier but they do store longer so you kind of got to weigh the pros and cons there if you're going for storage you might want to grow these as your sweet onion as opposed to the flattened ones and then we have the white onions so of all the onions we grew this year these will store the longest now obviously white onions aren't very sweet they have a really strong pungent onion flavor I like that onion flavor and some dishes and that's why we grew white onions so if you're going for sweetness you're probably not going to get long storage but if you want that strong onion flavor going to get some good storage out of these so those are just my experiences with comparing onion storage your experiences may be different and if they are please do share them in the comments below I have an okay onion storage system underneath the barn there it's not perfect but I don't have anywhere inside my house to put this many onions so that's why we put them underneath the barn yes they would probably store longer if we had some kind of indoor storage system but we're doing the best we can so you may find varieties of red onions that store much longer than my red onions or sweet onions that store much longer this can also vary depending on whether it's an intermediate day or long day type I'm just telling you what I have seen with these short day onions so now we've got those onions pulled we can start getting this part ready to plant some watermelons in the next couple weeks gonna have to pull up that drip tape probably wheel hoe this area rake a lot of those weeds out of there and probably wheel hoe it several times to really work on our weed seed bank and get this nice and manageable again we don't want a bunch of weed pressure in here when we're growing watermelons we've still got some cabbage over here some broccoli over here this cabbage is already heading up so it won't be here much longer the broccoli hasn't started forming heads yet but it won't be long especially with it warming up the way it's been 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 I promise I don't have any secrets that I haven't told you about as far as growing big onions just watch this video right here we've got 10 easy to follow tips and if you follow those tips you'll be able to grow some big onions as well so check that out and we'll see you next time right here at Lazy Dog Farm

Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 16,891

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: HcGA_bQKXwc

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023