How We Grow Huge Storage Onions (Harvest, Curing & FAQs)

In this video we're going to harvest our onions and I'm going to go over some tips and tricks on how to grow big beautiful onions like this. And I'll go over why we picked these onions and how to store them. Let's get harvesting. It's July 3rd here in southwest Ohio. In fact people are getting ready for the 4th of July because we just heard some fireworks. You might hear those in the video. Hopefully they're not distracting but we're going to be harvesting our onions today. So I'm going to get to harvesting and kind of while I'm doing that Hilary's behind the camera right there and she's going to ask me kind of a series of questions. One of the questions that a lot of you are probably wondering at this very moment is how do we know our onions are ready to harvest? That is a good question. An important question. So one of the things you can see is the bed looks kind of fallen over and what's happened here and we can probably zoom in up this way because there's one that I'm about to harvest that you can see you can see how the neck of these onions have sort of flopped over like that. Generally when that happens it's because all of the energy that's stored in the leaves is being put back down to the bulbs and there goes one of those fireworks and that means the onion is ready to harvest. This generally happens right around summer solstice for our medium day length onions. Which probably gets us to one of the other questions that people have a lot. So you just said medium day length onions. What does that mean and how does that dictate when to harvest, what kind of onions to plant, what does that even mean? Yeah so onions are unique in that when they get the signal to make a bulb is based on the amount of day length that you have and because there's different longest days depending on your latitude so really northern areas have really long days around summer solstice and then more southern towards the equator they have more around 12-ish hour days you have to pick the right type of onion for your area. Here in southwest Ohio we are at sort of the confluence of the medium day length and the long day length onion so we can actually grow both of those but if you were you know down in Alabama or something like that you probably would have to grow a short day length onion in order to get it to bulb because what will happen is after a certain number of hours of daylight that's the signal that the onions have to start creating a bulb and if you tried to grow a long day onion in a more southern area the day would never get long enough for the onion to be induced to bulb so that's super important. When did you start all these onions Peter? So we started these I think it was the third week of January. We like to start our onions from seed and we found better results starting them from seed versus just buying the sets or the little bulbs that you can get and so we started them in January they were started indoors obviously because it's pretty frigid and frozen here in January and then we planted these out third week of March I think this it was March 22nd this year usually we're trying to get these out somewhere around kind of middle to end of March and so they've been in the ground at this point a little more than three months. So Peter can you tell everyone why we've chosen to start the onions from seed rather than buying the plants in the spring at the store which seems honestly a lot easier? Yeah in fact I have an example of the main reason why so the main reason why is we found less bolting and I'll explain that in a little bit here but less bolting of onions when we started from seed. So onions are actually biennial so if we left these in the ground these would overwinter and then the next year they'd create a flower. Sometimes however onions get confused and they'll actually make a flower the first year and we found that's more likely to happen if they are already established. So the way that you like when you buy those little onion starts from the store what you're doing is they're they're starting the onion and then they're digging it up and shipping it to you and then you're planting it. So sometimes the onion can think oh this must be the second year because I was already started I got dug up I sort of went dormant and now I'm waking back up again and so you tend to get more bolting. Now you can get bolting even starting from seed as you can see here there's a couple that have bolted you can see these flower stalks and that's not a good thing I'll talk more about that in a little bit. Okay so all of these onions were planted at the end of March outside and what after after they were in the ground what kind of care did they need? Were they under row covers? Yeah so they remember they went in end of March which is still pretty cold here you can see there's these hoops here we do like in general to transplant them under sort of a fleece row cover just to kind of give them a little bit of extra warmth. Other thing that's important is they can't get too waterlogged so having them in a raised bed or a raised mound would be important too because we can get some pretty wet springs you don't want them kind of sitting in the water and rotting. As far as the soil goes probably get you in here to look at that in a little bit but this is basically our typical raised bed soil. In fact we did a video recently of kind of turning over a bed and I'll put a link to that so you can kind of see the soil and what we do there. Well you got us all wondering about the soil that these onions have been spending the last few months so why don't you just show us how beautiful it is and what it looks like. Yeah so this soil's been here a few years now. What I have over the top that is composted straw from our straw bale gardens but the actual raised bed soil I can get a handful of that got some onion roots in there but it's a you know mostly soilless doesn't have a lot of topsoil or anything like that compost peat moss really a lot of different varieties of compost stuff we make ourselves chicken compost stuff we buy and it all turns into that beautiful fluffy mix that apparently the onions love. So then I'm assuming you do some sort of fertilizer for these beauties. Yeah not as much as you'd think it really kind of starts with just making sure the bed is correct and like I said there's that video we did recently it'll kind of show how we set that up but onions do like a decent amount of nitrogen in the beginning and so if you're noticing that your onions aren't growing very well and then doing some sort of higher nitrogen fertilizer would be a good call. We like the Alaska fish fertilizer as a water soluble assuming that you didn't quite have enough nitrogen in your bed there. As they get farther on then you know maybe switching to a little bit more balanced fertilizer agro thrive is one that we like can work pretty well also. Look how good those onions look. So obviously the bed on our right looks like all of the stocks have flopped over but the bed on the left it looks pretty good so is it okay to harvest those on the left our left? We're actually going to wait on these for a little bit longer so the the ones over here on I guess your left my right these are Patterson onions they're long day onions whereas these are Sierra Blanca and they're medium day length onions. So remember these decided they were done for the season at sort of a medium day length which here in Ohio happens before summer solstice whereas these Patterson we are kind of at the southern end of long day so these didn't really start making their bulbs until summer solstice so we'll probably give these another week or so. It kind of depends on the weather a little bit if it gets really rainy next week we might pull them a little early but in general we're growing both medium and long day length onions and the medium day length onions are going to be ready to harvest sooner than the long day onions. All right this looks like the last of the Sierra Blanca which is the white onion that we're doing. Let me show you some of these while we I think they're celebrating us by having fireworks go off. You can see how just how great these look and just beautiful onions and I'm gonna we're gonna kind of swap and I'm gonna take the camera and Hillary's gonna tell us what she likes to cook with these. All right so we have our Sierra Blanca onions and Hillary what what do we like making with these? So these are a white onion and they don't store as long as the other onions we grow so I use these in mostly fresh salsas sliced for hamburgers so in terms of summer cooking think of anything you would make in the summer these are the first onions I go for because they don't store as long but they're huge and they're really good so yeah. So what variety are you harvesting right now? So these are cabernet they're also a medium day length onion obviously a red or purple onion and so we really really like these as well obviously they also get quite large if grown correctly and as far as spacing you probably come in here a little bit and see this. I have these you know somewhere around maybe five inches apart or so within rows but then actually pretty far apart these ones are maybe you know nine inches or so between rows. I think the Patterson which was in the other bed are a little bit tighter spacing and but that that seems to work pretty well for us. This year we are growing we have two beds of onions last year we just did one bed. Okay it looks like the bolts are all sort of popping up did you do that or did they just do that on their own? They do that on their own so one thing that you might hear is that people will do something called spooning their onions sounds like they're cuddling with them or something but what that means is like basically taking something and removing soil around it. I don't think that's necessary I think if you grow your onions correctly they're just going to pop out of the soil on their own. Now I don't know maybe if they were in like a really heavy soil where they couldn't push through as easily but I've never seen that so I think the whole spooning thing is basically you didn't grow your onions right and you're trying to make them do the thing that they should do naturally and so I don't do anything to have them kind of pop up like that they'll pop up on their own. Are there any other tips you can give people who want to grow onions maybe starting next year? Yeah so one of those tips is for you know more southern gardeners lots of times you can overwinter onions so plant them in the fall up here in the north we generally plant them in the spring. Other thing is something like this where you got this weed right here for the most part you want to keep your onion beds weed free they are very prone to being out competed by weeds and so having a weed free bed is important some sort of mulch or something to do that helps a lot there but I'll probably just get the rest of these cabernet out and then we'll look at actually a non-onion in here which is one of Hillary's favorite things that we grow but before we do that once I get these cabernet we'll switch on the camera and Hillary will tell you a little bit about these onions and what she likes them for. Gosh harvesting an onion is pretty satisfying it's just it's just a big thing you pull it out and boom that's it whereas like no offense but green beans I mean that's just so repetitive and peas an onion you just pull and voila it's like what a kid would dream up As opposed to the white onions what do you like the red onions for? I mean red onions have a slightly different flavor anybody who likes onions can agree yes they have a little bit more complex of a flavor but I actually prefer them in Indian and Thai cooking and I cook that food from those cuisines quite often especially in the fall and winter so if a recipe calls for you know just this onion I tend to use these ones. Now in comparison to the white onions do these store differently? They store a little longer than the sierra blancas I would say this is the second in line to go so order of operations would be sierra blancas are number one these are number two to be used because they will go bad faster. All right so next variety these are the Rasa de Milano they're also a purple or red onion a little bit different than the cabernet they're more of a long day onion so they do store a little bit longer they have kind of a unique shape. And why do we have a beautiful flower popping up from one of the Rasa de Milano? I talked about that before but let me pull this out and I'm going to show you something about it. So here is what we call a bolted onion you can see it's got this flower stalk it's quite a flower stalk actually. Now the issue with the flower stalk is that will keep the stem firm it won't flop because the stalk is nice and sturdy and this flower stalk actually goes all the way into the onion and so when you're trying to dry it what you're trying to do is make it have sort of a constriction of dry leaves at the top and unfortunately once they bolt you can't get that and so this you know even with proper curing probably would only store you know two three months max whereas with proper storing otherwise these are you know a good nine ten months. So I've been harvesting these some of them have a little bit of floppy necks but actually a lot of them are still pretty sturdy and so I actually think I'm gonna leave these Rasa's another week or two if it looks like we're gonna get a lot of rain I'll probably pull them but these are more of a long day onion so just like the Pattersons which are in the bed next door I think these could use just a little bit more time so let's go ahead and look at what's right next door which are Hillary's favorite thing in here. Okay Peter what is the favorite? They look like onions but these are actually shallots these are conserver shallots and so shallots tend to you can kind of see it here see how it almost looks like there's two onion plants coming out of this they do tend to have kind of multiple bulbs in there and so there's kind of a hybrid between you know sort of like a garlic onion the shallots this variety of shallots has lasted a really long time I don't want to steal Hillary's thunder when she talks about them but these have been super super impressive so let me get these out of here shallots as far as you know growing they're really no no different than the onions kind of same same growing conditions onions and shallots do prefer prefer cooler weather so that's why we like to get them in in the spring and basically it's kind of a race to see how big of a plant how much energy can this plant store before it makes a bulb so we'll get these shallots out of here and then we'll hand the we'll swap cameras and Hillary will talk about what she likes about them. So shallots are they planted at the same time as the onions do they follow the same growing pattern do they need a certain amount of day length is it basically the same thing or do you just happen to have them in the same bed because they're kind of similar? Yeah they they're they're all they're in the allium family same family as the onions and they are very very similar prefer similar conditions I'm not positive if they follow the same thing where they need a certain day length hours if anyone knows and they want to put that in the comments let us know and but uh we basically grow them exactly the same as we would grow our onions. So you started them in January? Started in January these were planted the same time in March one thing with shallots again if you look here this is almost like two two shallots in one so if you look there's kind of these two separate bulbs here part of the reason the conserver variety stores for so long is because it tends to form kind of one bigger bulb which can have a more continuous sort of dry paper around the bulb versus some other types of shallots. So tell me about shallots how are they different than onions? They are very similar to onions but they are obviously smaller and they have a slightly sweeter and garlicky flavor but they aren't quite as strong and astringent as garlic. I love shallots and I have been using them all year long in fact I used them in a recipe last night and I used shallots that we harvested last year that's how long they've lasted us. Anytime I make something that doesn't and I don't have an onion on hand I'll just grab a shallot and use that instead and a little bit of shallot goes a long way. This bug decided it likes shallots too but it's landing on my face instead of the shallots so if you don't cook with shallots or you do and you're considering growing them these are probably my favorite allium to have and they last forever. So this bed like I said we're not harvesting quite yet if we get a lot of rain I might change my mind but these are our Patterson onions these are the yellow kind of long-term storage onions you can see they're packed in there pretty good but a lot of really nice looking bulbs. These ones last a lot longer than the Sierra Blanca or the Cabernet and so usually we get to keep these somewhere in the 9-10 month range I would say. Surprisingly the shallots were the thing that lasted the longest of everything last year so but we also had a lot of bolting last year. Last year we were on vacation end of June and we had a crazy heat wave even hotter than this past week that we've had it's been really really hot here and that stress kind of just induced a lot of them to flower last year and so that limited our storage ability. Speaking of storage we are now going to head on into the barn we've got the garlic there that's already done and we're going to replace that with the onions and we'll show you how we do that. Well friends after much consideration Peter has decided to in fact harvest the Rasa de Milanas. Yeah a lot of them were sort of flopping over and I don't know maybe this is just my my thing I really like just being able to turn a bed over and I was going to be annoyed having just these few onions here and not being able to kind of recharge this bed and start thinking about what we're going to get in here. As far as what we're going to get in here actually that's probably a good question what do we what do you follow along with you're harvesting your onions in July you know what what do you plant next so a few options there. One option would be to do another relatively short to maturity summer crop green beans great option in fact I'm not sure if you can see the bed not here but right behind but that had all of our broccoli and we followed that with bush beans and they're just starting to flower and we'll be harvesting beans here pretty soon and so that's a really good option nice thing about that it's just direct sowed and since they're legumes they'll fix a little nitrogen kind of bring some nitrogen back into the bed. Other option would be to just hold off a little bit and save this bed for fall brassicas. As far as timing of those we're actually getting pretty close to planting out our brussel sprouts and our storage cabbage. We grow a type of cabbage called storage number four and it's over 100 days to maturity so we like to plant that out around mid-July along with our brussel sprouts. As far as broccoli cauliflower those sort of things those we don't plant out until August so you could either just mulch the bed or do a kind of mid-summer cover crop buckwheat is a good option for that and while we're waiting for the brassicas to come in but let's get all these and go into the barn and talk about curing them. All right well we are in the barn it's getting dark so we got some of the lights on we have all the garlic here and the garlic has been with these fans for a little bit of time it's actually looking really good and you can hear very dry so I think we can get this garlic off of here and then get the onions onto the rack. All right Peter tell us about the curing setup. Yeah it's nothing nothing fancy so we're in the barn and we have these old you know wire rack closets and so I just attach them to the wall and then I have a couple fans and it's nice to have them in a relatively dry place it is pretty humid here so you know I'm kind of sweaty right now it stays pretty humid but you know with the roof on and the fans going the whole time it's pretty warm as well so these have dried these have dried pretty well so and we're going to get all these off and then for the onions we're going to kind of put them the same way where the greens are facing down and I'll show you that here in a second. So it's all hardneck but look here's that really pretty purple it's a chestnut red and then the other is music music so pretty look at that year's worth of garlic I love gardening so great so this year it seems like the greens on my onions are a little bit more robust normally I can kind of just slide them through these slots here but when I'm doing that I'm kind of tearing them which could increase the risk of putting in fungal diseases so actually what I'm going to do just for now is I will just put them up on top of the rack I'm going to have the fan on and let those greens kind of dehydrate a little bit kind of get floppier and then I will come back in a couple days and slide them through we got a lot of work to do because I want to try to get a lot of these started to cure and it's already 9 30 p.m in fact the fireflies are out right now it's super pretty if you have any questions let me know us in the in the comments if you have any questions Hillary's happy to answer them as well yeah and hopefully you enjoyed this hopefully it helped educate you and inspire you to grow onions and so happy gardening everyone