Growing Onions

How to grow Onions

 

The onion is one of the most underrated vegetables, mainly because shop bought varieties tend to be bland at best and onions have become almost a commodity.

When growing onions yourself, you can choose to grow for your own tastes instead of having to settle for the rather bland conformity of shop bought onions. How strong a flavour the onion has depends on the sulphur content, the more sulphur the stronger the flavour of the onion. Like all plants onions require potash to grow, and it is the amount of potash available to the onion that determines the amount of sulphur absorbed, the more potash the less sulphur.  So a low amount of potash will result in smaller but stronger flavoured onions.

Another way of regulating the size of the onion is the spacing between the plants, the close together they are the smaller the onion will be.

Growing Onions from Sets or Seed

Main bulb onions (white onions and red onions) are either grown from seeds or sets, which are effectively small bulbs.

Spring onions or scallions (green onions) are always grown from seed.

While starting from seed is not difficult, it is often better for beginners to start of with sets. This is because the onion sets have a head start so they start growing more quickly, they are more disease resistant, in general they will crop better in poorer soils and will usually provide a crop even if they go in later than they should.

On the other had growing onions from seed has the following advantages, the seeds are cheaper to buy than the sets and come in far more varieties. Onions grown from seed are far less prone to bolting and in the main seem to store better.

Japanese onions are grown to over-winter and should really be grown from sets, they do not however store very well but do fill a gap between the end of those main onions in store and the start of the next crop.

Shallots are practically always grown from sets. You can get seed but it's very unusual. Cultivation is very similar to onion sets except they like a little longer in the ground Shallots, apart from the flavour difference being considered sweeter and milder, has an advantage of storing for longer.