Hi Guys
I'm a newbie so hope I don't break any protocols, I have a small allotment that I share with my next door neighbour, we look on every year with envy at the older guys pulling up these ginormous onoins.
Can someone tell me.
1) can we buy giant onion sets and if so where from, or do we need to grow from seed?
2) what is the best feed and how often do we need to feed them.
Hello Eddie, can you not gleen some information form those who you say grow enormous onions ? Local advice is often the best.
In my experience sets will not produce the largest onions, although they are convenient and suitable for most home growers. If you want large exhibition onions you need to start now by sowing seed in a temperature of 50-60F pricking off into deep boxes or singly into pots and eventually hardening off to be planted outdoors.
In normal fertile soils a general fertiliser applied to the soil before planting out will suffice. The exhibition growers will of course continue feeding with their own prefered mixture - probably a liquid feed, and jelously guarded.
A final note - I find that the large onions are not the best for culinary use by far; medium sizes and shallots are.
When to plant, and what to plant depends a lot on where you are. In the northern latitudes you want to plant long day onions. If you are in the South, you will want to plant short day onions.
Check with your local nurseries for onion plants, or sets. Plant very early in the spring as soon as you can get on the ground. Plant each set or plant 5 inches apart. Onions respond well to fertile soil.
When the onions are done growing the tops fall over. For storage onions you shoud leave them in the ground until the tops have dried up quite well. Then pull them and dry them more in a shed.
Of course you can pull and eat onions fresh at any time in their development.
I plant red onions, Walla Walla, Yellow Spanish onions, and lately I have been planting some "Big Daddy" onions. The Big Daddys sure get large. They are a yellow onion.
I grow mine in a raised bed with very loose soil and get onions up to 6 inches+ in diameter.
Lacking a raised bed you might try mounding the rows and planting the sets on top.
