Evaluating My Onion Choices
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A few of my onion plant tops have fallen over, indicating they are ready for harvest.
It looks like my onions will be ready to harvest sometime soon.
Some of them have “bulbed up” nicely. The green tops of two plants have fallen over – which is the surest sign that they are ready to harvest.
But they’re not all that consistent. Quite a few look like they need to grow some more. So now is a good time to evaluate. What went wrong? What went right? What should I do differently next year?
My biggest regret in the onion patch is that I didn’t fertilize them enough. Onions are heavy nitrogen feeders. At planting time, back in mid-November as I recall, I sprinkled some Medina Growin’ Green granular fertilizer in the row with the onion sets. After a few weeks, I side dressed them with some blood meal, which is high in nitrogen.
That was about all the fertilizer they got. I had every intention of drenching them with fish emulsion every cou-ple of weeks. I think I did that once. I just never seemed to get around to it. I think they would have benefitted from the additional nitrogen. Now that they’ve bulbed, adding nitrogen won’t do any good. It could even cause a few problems like poor storage quality.
I’ll just have to live with what I got this year. Moisture, however, is critical at this point in the onion life cycle. They need lots of water to finish bulbing. So I’ve been watering the onion patch every day.
I follow gardener Travis Key and his YouTube channel Lazy Dog Farm. He’s located in southern Georgia in Zone 8b – a similar climate to our’s in Central Texas, although they tend to get a little more rain. However, Key said they’ve been suffering through an extraordinary drought as of late. This week he posted a video about his onion patch. He noted that the onions he planted in October have bulbed larger and more consistently than the ones he planted in November.
`Next year, besides adding more fertilizer, I’m going to try to plant onions a month earlier, in October. I may have to germinate my own transplants from seed. I don’t know if the garden stores will have onion sets available that early.