As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter
My mother was not much of a gardener. My Grandfather was a wonderful gardener. Gram......she used to just step on onion greens to keep them from going to seed. That was about her ability at everything.
The mother used to just plant green onions for green onions. They never grew large, and that goes for the onion sets.
I never had much fortune with onions, in I just left a few of the set onions and they would be small failures come fall that were not worth the time.
I read on onions like I do most vegetables and the experts all told me, you can only get onions to bulb up, by planting seeds, starting inside in February, as onions are long season, and with feeding and other miracles, you get Georgia size onions.
Last year I planted Vidalia onions...........they are not for here, and here was a wet, not hot summer, and they just disappeared.
The thing is I watch my neighbors and figured they grew onion sets, and they got onions when it was wet. We have a Hutterite family which lives over in a clay gumbo soil area, where it rains allot. The woman raises piles of onions........... I mean she could supply Walmart. I have no idea what them Hutterites do with all them onions, but she raises some whoppers.
This year it was dry and I did not think the Hutterite was going to do so good, but I decided to give it a try here. I loosened my concrete pioneer garden soil, made a small trench for watering, and we planted the sets.
The Robins unplanted numbers of them.
I replanted them.
As it was dry I started watering them in, to keep the Robins from plucking them out.
I watered the onions religiously, like I did the potatoes and beets.....like the entire garden.
I watched them, and after awhile they started bulbing up, like months.
We finally harvested on October 13th. TL had read that if you leave onions in the ground too long they will rot. We were drought dry, and I was concerned as early I found some root maggot eating an onion off. There was none of that, but we had maybe a dozen which started growing again, maybe a total of 25 which were green growers or rotting.
The end result though was that we were blessed by God with a 6 gallon and 5 gallon bucket of very large onions.
We ate the first fruits in celebration of a few which were divided and starting to rot, and with fried hashbrowns they were were delicious. These onions were very sweet, some of the best onions we have ever had.
So the always experts were full of shit. We planted regular bulb sets, but got them in, in early May. I would have planted earlier, but we expanded the garden, the neighbor had to dig it with his loader tractor and it was a bitch getting things worked up as we need a tractor.
If this had not worked, I doubt I would have messed with onions again, as I have no time to start seeds. I will have to see how the onions keep, we have them in the basement and we will try some upstairs in the warmer and drier kitchen.
I would like to try again next year. Trying in adding some red onions, as the red onions we get are shit, meaning strong, tough skins and worthless. Nothing like in the metro. So I would like to try the a few dozen reds, and plant again these yellows or whites which we tried this year.
Honestly, if you have good enough soil, you do not need to fertilize and onions are like most things in getting them in early enough and then watering the blessing into them, and you can grow onions too.
I just don't think we will ever eat 11 gallons of onions. It was good to find this out as I doubt we eat 40 onions a year.
Like all things in my drought zone, the key is small trenches to concentrate the watering. That is the biggest secret in all of this.
Nuff Said
agtG
