Onions can be tricky to grow because there are many varieties, often depending on different amounts of sunlight to start bulbing.
For example, short day onion seedlings should be planted in the fall to produce bulbs the following summer when the days don’t exceed 12 hours of sunlight. That works wonderfully to the south but not so well for our cold, slug infested winters and longer summer days, so I plant long day onions that bulb up later in the season when days are longer.
David prefers red onions for salads so I usually plant them as well as Walla Walla’s and a storage variety, with leeks for winter. We also have chives that keep on growing year after year because I only harvest the tops. I was once given some Egyptian Walking Onions, named for their tendency to grow top heavy with bulbils that topple over and take root to grow even more onions. Mine must have wandered off entirely, because I didn’t get a single onion from them. I had put them among my flowers but they disappeared and I never tried them again.
Some garden pundits assure us that slugs don’t like onions, but I’ve seen hordes of them munch through my entire onion patch, unconcerned by expert opinion. Experience has taught me to keep slugs out by keeping a foot wide dry perimeter around the entire bed, using soaker hoses that only water the plantings and waiting until the soil is dry before covering it with mulch. I also start onion seeds in flats inside and transplant them once the soil dries up, reducing slug predation. Slugs return with the fall rains but freezing winter temperatures send them packing until the spring thaw, so now I just wait till dry, hot summer to set out my onion seedlings. Pill bugs haven’t bothered my onions so far, but I daren’t say this out loud.
Chives seem to grow themselves as long as they’re watered. I planted a few seeds years ago and have been harvesting chives from the batch ever since. When they send out their lovely purple flowers, I leave them alone for a while to enjoy the flowers, then I start cutting again, pulling out the flower stalks from my handful of cuttings and putting the flowers into a vase for the house. Chive flowers are edible but we have so much else to eat that I prefer looking at them, although David uses some to garnish his salads.
Leeks spend 120 to 150 days in the garden and survive cold weather, so I grow them for winter use: storage onions are nice but fresh leeks beat them hands down. They have a milder taste and are easy to grow; slugs don’t eat them as much, and we can harvest them until the ground freezes too hard to chop them out.
Onions require a surprising amount of fertilizer, so before sowing the transplants I replenish the bed by digging under the cover crop and weeds, then sprinkling organic fertilizer and compost over the bed and raking that smooth before sowing. I can’t do this until the weather warms up and dries out the bed or the onions will disappear. I used to wonder what happened to them when I sowed during our mild, wet spring, until I sneaked out there with a flashlight and saw slugs crawling all over them.
I sowed all my onions and leeks inside in flats about a month ago and expect to harvest the Walla Walla and reds at the end of summer, the storage onions a month later and the leeks until the ground starts blunting my shovel.
David starts virtually everything he cooks with a mirepoix of onions, garlic and sweet peppers, so we like to keep these on hand. You just can’t buy fresh, home grown flavour at the grocery; the supply chain doesn’t work that fast.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
