Grow onions and spring onions from seed, for large harvests of high quality

This is about growing onions and salad onions, in fact, sometimes called spring onions. You grow them in exactly the same way. Well, not quite exactly, but so similar that we can cover it all in one film and I'll point out the differences as we go along. In this case, I'm filling a tray with some homemade compost that I put through a very rough sieve. You could also use any multi-purpose compost. It doesn't have to be specifically seed compost. The main thing is that there's some drainage capabilities. The worst thing for seeds is compost that lies wet and soggy. I'm pushing it in because that means I can get a decent amount of compost. When compost is light and fluffy, it's better to firm it in before sowing or pricking out, and that way you've got a nice firm medium which won't all fall apart when you push it out at planting time. So the seeds, this is some home-saved seed actually, which makes it a bit different. Not so perfect looking. We've got little clusters, but a lot of nice seeds there. I filled a tray with compost. You want reasonable sized cells, four centimeters, just over an inch, so that there's a decent amount of compost there. Onion seedlings are surprisingly hungry, even though they look quite thin and meager. So I'm being not exactly precise here, but I'm aiming for six, eight even seeds per cell. And it can be that you could go even more. If you want spring onions, you could do up to 10 seeds per cell, and you'll be planting these out as a clump, not thinning them out. And well, you've got your bunch of spring onions in that case, but even if it's bulb onions, they are very happy growing together, being planted together as a clump. And what it means is you get, say, four, five medium onions per little block, instead of if you thin them down to one, you would get one big one. And on the whole, it works out more efficient. You seem to get more onions, and you certainly get a bigger crop compared to the amount of compost you've used and the amount of space needed in a greenhouse, for example. So this is February, late winter, and it's about as early as you want to sow onions in the first half of the year, but you could have sowed these. One can sow them in late August, right at the end of summer, to plant out in early autumn, or sow them direct in late summer, early autumn. And that way, they stand the winter as small plants. And I do that every year, actually, for spring onions. There are some out in the garden now, which are looking really well. They've had quite a bit of frost on them in cold weather, but onions are very tolerant of that. You don't need to worry about cold on onions. Really, you do want to get them going early, because what happens then is they have more time to grow. To some extent, anyway, they're triggered by daylight. So onion bulb formation begins around the time that days start to shorten, which means that if you can get your onions in the ground in good time, you have more chance of getting a decent-sized bulb, because they will have put on quite a bit of leaf and root general plant growth before the energy goes into making bulbs. And on that note, just one quick word on sets. You can also grind this from sets as opposed to seeds. And the sets do not want to go in early, because they are already a slightly grown small onion. And if you plant them too early, it triggers that small onion into thinking it's been through a winter, and then it will flower rather than making a bulb. So sets do not plant them before the spring equinox. That's my advice. Whereas seeds, you can sow even in late winter, as we are here. And having sown the trays, I'm giving a light, gentle water from above with a fine rose on the can. This compost was quite moist, so I'm not watering a lot. Sometimes you might need to water a bit more. And then let them drain and put them wherever you want to let them grow. Basically, in this case, it's winter, so I'm bringing them indoors to the house where they're warmer. For planting out, onions are hardy plants. They resist some frost, cold weather. And you can pop them in early spring. It's 13th of March today. So this is a good average time to plant them. And I'm making holes for the modules, which I sowed them into four or five weeks ago. And they're multi-sown, as we saw at different times. So here we have four, five, six onions in a clump, and I'm putting them in quite deep. This is a variety of normal bulb onion, yellow onions. You could plant them when they're bigger than this. On the whole, I find that plants do really well when they go in quite small, because that gives them more chance of establishing quickly with less root disturbance. And you can see how quick it is. Make a little hole, pop it in. I'm also leaning on the bed a bit, as I'm sure you've noticed. And all I'm doing really is pushing the compost down, so that doesn't matter. And that now is a row of onions. It's eight plants times average five, probably. 40 onions potentially there, which are gonna be then fleeced over to grow on for harvest in the summer. The onion family has huge versatility. And look at these onions here, which I sowed in late August last year. This is now April. So they're coming up eight months old, and I multi-sowed them in a clump. Six to eight, even some of them had 10 seeds, actually. So a lot of onions there. I've already taken out one or two big ones from most of these clumps. And this is what I'm doing, thinning out as I harvest. So twisting out the largest one there, or two. And then to get them ready for table, all you need to do is peel off the outer sheath like that. And you have a lovely spring onion. And the reason these look a bit yellow and grotty is because they have been here all winter. So these have just been standing here without any protection whatsoever. No fleece or mesh or cloche. They've had frost and hail and lots of rain and wind. And yet, you know, they're now really growing strongly and giving lots of lovely food. So that is one option you have. Sow them in late summer, in this case, August. Here we are, 10 weeks later. And these are the clumps of onion seed that I sowed in February, planted in March. So it's now 14 weeks since they were sown, 10 weeks since they were planted here. They've had some fleece over to help them through the cold weather of late March and April. And it was quite frosty. They don't mind being frozen, but keeping cold winds off speeds their early growth. So that's how I'm already there, a good size onion. Suitable, very suitable for harvesting as spring onions. Now, if I want to keep these all to grow into bulb onions, which they will do. It's a bulb onion variety, stir on. And I'll let all these grow. I'll have nine, in this case, there's nine here, quite small onions, rather than say four or five medium size or if there's only one or two really big. So it's your choice entirely. So what you can do at this stage is gently pull and twist, cajole some of these onions out of the clump to thin them out. And that gives a harvest of spring onion, even though this is a bulb onion variety. Cause at this stage of growth, spring onions, basically it's an immature onion, which hasn't yet bulged up. So it's more stem than bulb. And you can see, I can just peel off the little sheath of old leaf there and that's nice spring onions. And I'm going to actually go through and do all of these in the next week or 10 days. We're going to have heaps of spring onions cause I want to get all of these clumps, which are for bulb onions, down to four or five. And then we'll see them late July, probably in about another two months, how they've swelled up in their final stage of growth, making bulbs. Now it's middle of July and it's onion harvest time. Five months after they were sown, these multi-sown blocks of onions are ready to come out. How do you judge when to harvest an onion? Do you see how the tops are all gone flat? I did help them a bit. They'd gone down more than a half, two thirds. And for me, that's a sign that harvest is approaching. There's always a few that tend to stand up and it's good to push those ones over so that it softens the neck. Sometimes otherwise they can develop a long stem and a neck that doesn't dry very well. So I've pushed the remaining ones down. So they're all down now. The neck of each onion is bent over at right angles. And even in the last few days, actually, I've noticed the bulb swelling a bit. It's a very joyful sight. So when you can see that, not only is there a good size onion there, but they're starting to color up as well. The tops are still green. So it's not a question of waiting for the tops to go yellow. And you can see how four or five onions in a clump, quite close based, even where we've taken some spring onions out back in May. We're getting a hell of a harvest here. It's going to be fascinating to dry these off a bit and then weigh them to see what there is. So in terms of drying, what I'm going to do is put them in a crate with in such a way that you want to have it so that there's some air around the leaves. This crate is now going to go undercover on a pallet in my compost bay. It could go in a greenhouse. It could go in a garage on a table. That's all good. Or if your climate is quite reliably dry, you could put it, your crates of onions, or even just loose onions on the soil. You can just leave them like this to dry in the sun. So it's up to you how you do it, but they do want to have a period of drying with air around the stalks, which are still green, so that they cure and dry, and then they will store well through the winter, even until the spring. Last year, we harvested onions like this in the middle of July, and I got them nice and dry over about a month. And then with the dry tops, bunched them, hung them up in the house, and we were still using them in the following April. So from harvesting now, that you've got a nine-month period of usage for that onion. What a great vegetable to grow. It's fun to grow, lovely to harvest, and they store. You've got sweet food over a long period of time.