Advice for first time onion grower?

[TheWaterbug]

A lot of my onion plants have been knocked over, and I think that might be the dogs that the neighbors walk down the trail every morning or else the peafowl deciding to lie down for the night in the middle of my patch. It doesn't seem to hurt the onions too badly.

OK, apparently I'm full of fertilizer.

Every day I go out and look, a few more have fallen over. So this is clearly The Beginning Of The End (tm) for this crop.

Is there any benefit to waiting another week or so for them all to fall over? Or should I just pull them and dry them this weekend? It's supposed to be in the low to mid 80s.

Or should I just leave them in the ground and pick them as I need them? If I leave them in the ground, should I stop watering them?

[TheWaterbug]

As can you can see, the As and Cs are both bulbing nicely, while the Bs have all gone to scapes. There are a few bulbs in there, but not many. I'm going to conclude that these are mismatched to my climate, which means they're probably the Walla Wallas. Which means that Home Depot ought not to be selling them in my area. But that's another conversation

Well, now this is weird.

Quite a few of my "B" onions are actually bulbing, but I didn't know it because the bulbs are underneath the soil. While my A and C onions pushed their bulbs nearly all the way out, my Bs are buried. I dug a few this weekend, and this is pretty typical:



There's a scape that fell off before I took the picture. But the stalks are very firm and upright, and most have scapes. And then there are bulbs underground that vary from 2" in diameter all the way up to 4-5", though most are in the 2-3" range.

Notably, the B bulbs are completely white, and they're much flatter than the A and C types, with some of them having almost a bagel-like shape.

Any opinions on what this means?

[jal_ut]

Don't get in a big hurry to pull them. Let them fall over and wait until the top actually gets dry before pulling them. They will keep better if you do this. Of course you can pull some to eat at any time.

[rainbowgardener]

Do onions have scapes? My onions just make the typical allium spherical fluffy flowers at the top of a straight stem. Firm upright stems and scapes sounds more like garlic. Onions usually have hollow stems.

[SOB]

The bottom of that actually looks like garlic if you ask me. I also have to agree with Rainbow but I have always used the word scapes to refer to the curly seed head that develops on garlic, not the seed bulbs that develop on onion. I could be wrong though…

OK…the definition of scape is “A long, leafless flower stalk coming directly from a root”

I noticed last year that the onions that I planted too deep bulbed in a skinnier/taller fashion then the ones I planted shallower. Those tended to bulb out of the ground. I read somewhere that onions like to stretch their shoulders, meaning the top of the bulbs out of the ground. Maybe you put the Bs in the ground a little further.

[benali]

You've got a lot of advice here and probably don't need mine. Nevertheless, I've had a lot of fun growing onions so I'd like to tell you what I do.

1. I'm in a heavy black dirt region (midwest), so I turn up the dirt... and don't plant the onions in it! Instead I put a lot of compost mixed with a few leaves on top of the dirt, and grow the onions in that. They expand to a full size and are clean and easy to pick out. (If you grow them directly in the dirt here, they don't expand very big because the dirt is just too heavy and solid).

2. Onions are one of the few vegetables that can take care of themselves in the cold. So I let some over-winter, and am able to pick some green onions and bulbs out in the fall, spring, and even the winter. I plant a few new bulbs all year long, rather than just a single planting at one time in the year. It's fun to have an all-year-round fresh green. Kale's about the only other veggie I know of around here have that provides a fresh veggie outside the regular vegetable growing season.

Good luck and best wishes.

[TheWaterbug]

Don't get in a big hurry to pull them. Let them fall over and wait until the top actually gets dry before pulling them. They will keep better if you do this. Of course you can pull some to eat at any time.

I'd been neglecting that part of the garden for so long that it was getting overrun by grass. I also needed to give Jr. something to do while I tilled the pumpkin patch, so I had him pull all the A and C onions

They'd pushed themselves out of the soil, so they were really easy to harvest. Jr. basically just picked them up.

The Bs are still in the ground, with scapes standing straight up, so I'll consider what to do about those when I get back from my trip, 11 days hence.

So the As and Cs are drying on a table under the partial shade of a trellisy thingy:



I also had him pull the garlic:



I hope I got the timing on these right. Most of them had half their leaves go brown, but a few of them were still mostly green. The bulbs looked nice and plump.