What is the life cycle of ONION sets?

[Gary350]

Yellow Onions on the right side. I stuck them in the mud about 2nd week of March. Soil is clay I can not pull them out of the ground now. They are planted 4" apart. Tops are dying soil is hard and dry as cement. Onions look small.

Egyptian Walking onions on the left side were planted about 6 weeks ago. They need to be transplanted to better soil but not sure I should do that yet. When they make bulbs I will have onions sets to plant in better soil in a better location.

3 months of rain has finally stopped. When the rain stops it gets hot and dry there will not me much rain until Sept. I assume the onions on the right are finished growing..

[jal_ut]

Onions: Long Day onions for the North, Short Day onions for the South. There in TN you should plant Short Day onions. Plant them early, soon as you can get on the soil January or February. They bulb up when the daylight hours reach a certain length. Those in your pic may as well be pulled and use whatever is there.

Onion sets are usually planted early spring and put one set each six inches in a row and rows spaced 12 inches.

[jal_ut]

If you get some onion sets from the seed store and plant them early, you should get a nice large onion bulb.
You can let the onions grow till the tops fall on the ground and start to dry up. Then they are done growing.
You now pull them and let them air dry for a time then break off the tops and rub a few roots off and store the bulbs in a dry place. I like to put them in a mesh bag and hang them in the basement. They must be protected from freezing.
Of course you can pull some for green onions as they are first getting going, if you wish.

Onion seed planted early will develop into lots of green onions and if let go full season will make small bulbs here. Bulbs about an inch diameter is what I get.

[jal_ut]

Egyptian Walking onions are perennial. You need to decide where you can have a permanent clump of them and plant those in that spot and leave them. You can harvest the little bulbils as they come on the top of the leaves and also dig some of the plants now and then. They divide and spread out. This is a neat way to always have some onion available.

[jal_ut]

Oh, I should mention that if you plant a large onion bulb in the Spring, it will go to flower and make you some onion seed. Some of the sets you plant may also send up a flower shoot. I just clip the flower buds off and hope for a bulb. I know that if you let them go to seed the bulb doesn't get very big. Plant some and experiment. What they do will depend a lot on your climate and the time of year they are planted. As noted they are day length sensitive.

[Gary350]

The best I can hope for with Tennessee trees is full sun from 9 am to 5 pm that is 7 hours of sun. Today we have cumulus clouds so that gives the garden about 4 hours of direct sun light.

Big sky country like Arizona sun up at 5:30 am and down at 8:30 pm with no clouds that was 15 hours of direct sun light.