You're waiting TOO LONG before starting your ONIONS! | Growing Onions From Seed

we are starting onion seeds today so that you can actually get nice big onions and not these little tiny onions unless you just decide to harvest them early because you want pearl onions last year i had a pitiful onion harvest and so this year i am determined that i am going to do all of the steps so that we have a fabulous onion harvest again so the first step is making sure that you are picking the right type of onion for where you live with onions a little bit different than a lot of our other crops especially in the vegetable world you have long day onions short day onions and neutral day onions and if you get the wrong variety based upon your geographical location then you are really going to struggle with your onion so i live in the north so i need to make sure that i am doing long day onions because the way that they grow is determined by how many daylight hours you have in the spring and the summer months so here being north we're just a little bit south of the canadian border we definitely need to have long day onions and you can do a quick google search and look for where you're at for where you're going to fall for which variety but just make sure that you're picking the right ones then secondly once you've figured out am i long day neutral or short you want to make sure if storing said onions is something that you want to do and not just fresh eating then you want to make sure that you are picking storage varieties of onions so this even though it's a little tiny it's like the cutest little baby onion ever this onion was harvested in august and at the time of this filming we are in february and you can see it's storing just great even though it's super tiny which i'll talk about why this poor little onion and a lot of my onions this year are smaller caliber because it's just like almost a miniature but you want to have long type storage onions because these will sit on i have just a couple that i pull out and keep in the kitchen because i always need onions and then the rest of them i keep back in our back pantry which is out of direct daylight relatively cool not humid not getting steam and different heat you know from cooking in the kitchen but i will have our storage onions will last me i've had them go at least nine months some of them almost 12 months before they'll sprout and then it's time to be harvesting the rest of the new crop of onions so some of my favorites are patterson which is a yellow storage onion i'm trying this year this is a new one it is a red wing red onion typically your red and white onions don't have as long of storage but this one is supposed to be a storage variety i haven't grown it to store it yet myself so it's one that i'm going to be trying out and then i'm very excited about this one this is called newberg and it is a long storage onion as well this one has been grown in my area so pacific northwest typically a cooler summer climate wet and so i'm excited to try this one because if i can find or if you can find a seed company that is growing and seed saving their own seeds they're not just buying them and repackaging them which some seed companies do this one is siskiyou seeds they're out of oregon i'm in washington state so very similar climate i have found that getting seeds from if you can you can't always find one that's very specific to your area do some searching but i have found that they are acclimated and they usually grow better for me than ones that i get from just a large company that's growing you know in a different climate that's not exactly the same as mine so i'm really excited to try the newberg that one is new for me but in the past both patterson and copra have been excellent long storage varieties for us as well as a blush variety and i got it from dixondale onions when i was ordering sets and not starting them from seed on the blush i didn't find a seed source for the blush so i may or may not still order some sets from them and then do some seed saving on them so i have my own seeds but this year we're going to start with these now one of the things on when your seed starting i love to just reuse containers for onions specifically i like a where i can just fill this all with soil it's not individual cells and there's some decent depth here so this is oh it's probably about two and a half inches this one is closer to three maybe four so these i like rather than doing like egg cartons or little individual pots or like soil blocks because onions you need to start i have found most advice will tell you 10 to 12 weeks before your last average frost state in the spring because onions are a cool weather crop and that means that we can actually plant them out before the last frost date but i have found when starting them from seed which we're doing today that the onion little bulb if you only do 10 to 12 weeks it's still relatively small there's not much of a bulb it's much smaller than if you order sets in and so sets of where they have started them then they've stopped the process just long enough that they go into a little bit of dormancy so that they can ship them but then you're actually planting a bulb in the ground and it will grow for you rather than doing it from seed like we're doing now because you typically do have to seed start so i found that 16 weeks instead of 10 to 12 weeks gives me a larger bulb and is closer to the growth um habits of the sets when i get them in otherwise i have smaller onions not quite this small this one we had weird inclemental weather this year past year and it really affected my onion growth we had like 120 degree fahrenheit days triple digit temps for almost a full week and it seemed to really stunt the onions and i had a pitiful onion harvest so this year i'm determined that we're going to have a good onion onion harvest again so i'm starting mine from seed this year rather than just depending all up on ordering sets so here is a potting soil mix i'll link to that you do when you're seed starting indoors want to use some type of seed starting mix i don't just bring soil in from outdoors one i don't want to deal with gnats the little soil gnats or white flies that can be in soil outside we will link to some of my other seed starting videos but you also don't want to use that because it's too compact and when you're in a container it's not the same as having the regular well like when it's in the ground because you don't have matrix pressure is different as well as gravity and surrounding soil so the soil whoops i see i was going to do this on a tray to try to keep all the dirt off my kitchen counter but we're going to end up with some dirt but that's all right so you want to make sure that you are using one i know this sounds weird but sterile soil meaning if it's bagged then it is sterile just meaning that it doesn't have any of the pathogens in it that we have from in the ground because we don't want to deal with any type of bacteria and fungal disease especially like wilt and dampening off disease all of those are diseases that are in soil especially garden soil and can really affect your new baby seedlings especially when they're indoors so you can buy obviously potting soil which is what i do you can make your own where you buy different components that you're so that you're making sure it's nice and loamy and not too compact or waterlogged etc and you can also take soil if you want to make your own and mix it and you can put it in the oven and sterilize it but i have found for seed starting i would just rather buy a bag where it's already done for me quite honestly and save all of my efforts for other things so i'm just kind of like breaking up see there's some little clumps in here so we're just going to break those up now when you're starting onion from seed onions tend to have a lower germination rate than a lot of your other seeds like tomatoes or peppers or things that you may be seed starting indoors so i always like to over sow and the other thing that's different with onion seed than most of your other garden seed is it has a relatively short shelf life so if you purchased onion seeds last year and used those and you had some left over and you go to use them again be year two often times your germination rate is even less and people get really frustrated not realizing that onions are one of the probably the of all the seeds especially like vegetable gardening seed wise they only really have a one year shelf life so if you've got onion seed that's more than one year old go ahead and plant it if you've got it but don't be surprised if hardly any of them actually germinate and grow for you you can see they're relatively they're relatively small so these are the the newburgh onion so you can see these are really they're small seeds they're kind of similar to like carrot size they're pretty little so i know that i can go through and actually thin these out and these are not their final resting place because i'll be transplanting transplanting these and you just pull them all the way out from the soil when it comes to transplanting time and i can thin them there so i can get multiple onion seeds started in here so i'm just going to do i'm going to do about three rows and i know it's very hard to see because these are black seeds going on black soil and i'm just going to do those a little bit densely and i'll worry about thinning them after they've sprouted and started to grow so now i'm going to do a full two rows of the yellow patterson just because i've grown these ones for many many years and i know that these store awesome so i want to have more of my storage onions that i know will store well then i do of these newer variety which is the red one so i'm just going to do one and a half rows of the red and do full these ones you can see a little bit better too so we've got our seeds in and you want to have them about a quarter inch deep so not not too deep but they're not surface sewn and then about a half an inch to an inch apart of your rose inside when you're doing kind of like these little pallet seed starting now these are all non-pelleted seeds they do make pelleted seeds they look like little white bbs and those are good if you're sewing really really large areas because they're a little bit larger and so you can see where you've placed them however i have tried pelleted versions in the past and none of the pelleted versions actually germinated for me when i was seed starting the non-pelleted version which is what we have here they germinated by day four i waited 14 days for the pelleted versions to germinate and they never did germinate so i don't know maybe i got a bad batch but i don't purchase the pelleted versions anymore due to my first experience trying to seed start with them so we have got these at a quarter inch deep and of course we need to have moisture when we're seed starting so i have one of these little it's actually for my house plants but it works well as a sprayer to evenly get the surface moist well it works well until you come on camera and then it decides to stop working so now that we have our soil nice and saturated with water there and moist we're just gonna i'm just gonna take my finger and just fill in the top of my little trenches here this also gives me a feel to like i can feel this this side is a little bit drier so i will give that one more spray on this side all right so this is why i really love to use seed starting and reuse these let it this is actually a lettuce container so i don't feel quite so guilty when we buy lettuce in the middle of winter if i don't have enough going in the high tunnel but this just comes closed and creates a perfect greenhouse environment so it doesn't dry out as fast it keeps it nice and moist which is key during the germination phase and then this one is actually i will be honest my husband bought the kids store-bought donuts so this is a donut tray but at least it's going to a good purpose afterwards i can't say it was necessarily a good purpose in the eating but you know so these they don't technically need light when like grow light let me preface that i wouldn't necessarily put these in a dark closet without any light but we don't have to worry about grow light on these during the germination phase what we want to make sure is that the top of the soil never ever dries out during germination and this is true for all seed starting but also especially true for our onion seeds so i'm going to actually go and place these by our wood stove just because that is a warm area and i'm not going to keep these on the island in my kitchen for the next couple of weeks as we go through germination phase but i'm going to go and put these over by the wood stove that is going to be a nice area i can keep an eye on them and anytime they start to dry out i don't know if you can see but we're actually starting like the little greenhouse effect i was talking about you can see moisture already starting to gather on the top of these lids and that wasn't there from overspray as i close them so it just creates like this perfect little environment for seed starting and then i can use these over and over again so we're going to go put these by the wood stove so these guys i'm just going to sit right here which is pretty close to the stove but they're not going to get knocked when i'm putting wood in it because it'll be from that side so once these guys have germinated we pull the tops off and then put them under the grow light they're going to grow their little green stacks look very similar to green onions and when those get above four inches so usually about 16 inches tall you want to give them a little haircut so you're just going to trim it and you're going to keep those green stalks about four inches tall and that is going to help them one be manageable otherwise you're going to have this huge thing of really tall falling over getting all tangled wispy green stocks and if you keep them trimmed not trimmed trimmed do about four inches they're still enough that they're able to grow and that the bulb will continue to form a little tiny bulb and the plants will be just fine but they will be much more manageable for you and then of course you'll want to harden them off as we do with any seeds that have been started inside and get them planted out at the appropriate time so i have this video that goes through grow lights that you can check out more in depth and i also have a complete seed starting ultimate seed starting guide if you've got more questions and need more in depth on seed starting on the website so you can grab that link below and go further there

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 80,021

Keywords: Melissa K Norris, Pioneering Today, Homesteading, Homestead Living, Pioneer Lifestyle, how to grow onions, growing onions, onion seeds, planting onions, how to plant onions, grow onions, how to, planting onions from seed, growing onions from seed, how to grow onions from seed, organic gardening, planting onion seeds, growing onions at home, planting onions at home, planting onions in containers, planting onions garden answer, planting onions in winter

Id: D2xklLvK5xI

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022