I planted a new variety of onion!

[Gary350]

My father use to plant onions in May then harvest them about August. His soil was better than my soil and his weather is 10 degrees cooler than mine. He use to say, let tops grow until they have a minimum of 10 leaves, 12 to 14 leaves are better. Knock the tops over with your foot or knock top over with the hoe then plants can not go to seed. After tops are knocked over onion bulbs will grow larger. When sun gets hot shade onions with news paper. Paper keeps sun off & breeze blows threw to remove heat. He made it look so easy and grew baseball size onions. I need a spot just for onions with soil preparation just for onions maybe my onions will do better. You should be able to grow a good garden in TX when I lived in Phoenix AZ area I planted garden Nov 1st best garden I every had, I grew things I can not grow in TN. 70 degree winter temperature was perfect for AZ garden.

[tedln]

I've never had to knock the tops over. I plant seedlings in January or February and in late April or late May, we get winds that always knock the tall tops over. Some of the bulbs are large in mid June while some are only average size, yet all grew in identical conditions. I'm hoping the Texas Legend variety will produce a more consistent, large bulb size than the Texas 1015 has in the past. If some of the plants reach the ten to fourteen leaf size before the wind blows them over, I will knock them over and see what happens. It should be interesting.

I also planted some generic white sets the other day to produce onion tops for consumption. I'm not sure why, but it always bothers me to pull small bulbing onions in order to only harvest the tops.

[Taiji]

Planted my Candy onions in flats about a week ago. Germination is very good; they all seem to be coming up.

I also ordered some Ailsa Craig seeds the other day; seems like they get huge in northern latitudes. Germination is very good too. All seem to be coming up in my flats.

When ordering the Ailsa Craigs, I was only able to get 1200 seeds at a time. Much more than I'll ever use though I will put some seeds directly into the garden for green onions. If anyone would like to try some, just pm me your address and I'll send out 25- 30 seeds. Don't worry about postage, I have plenty of discount postage laying around. Might as well get rid of them, I don't think onion seeds are as viable a year or 2 later.

They are considered a long day northern latitude onion though.

[imafan26]

I found that more than variety matters with onions. Soil and environment matters a lot whether onions are sweet or not. I usually plant Texas Granax at the end of October since it is a short day onion. When I harvest in May, they are very sweet but after 2 weeks they get very hot. Storage is an issue in warm humid climates.

[tedln]

My Texas Legend onions are doing great with tops about one foot tall. I will need to pull some in about three weeks when I plant my pepper plants. I always plant my peppers among the onions. They get along fine and I get green onions every year. We are supposed to get a storm tonight with wind gusts up to seventy miles per hour. I hope it doesn't break my onion tops over.