WHITE ONIONS & BURGUNDY RED ONIONS, TWO ONION VARIETIES TO GROW
variety both these varieties are excellent to grow in your garden
so these are the onion sets we will be using to grow our white onions so when
growing onions from sets the advantage is that you've already got a
head start into the growing part of the plant when you grow onions from seed it
takes a long time for the bulbs to reach the size that you're looking at so to
grow onion sets what the companies that sell you the onion sets do is they plant
a lot of onion plants very close to each other and then when the bulbs become of
the size that you see here they remove them and they sell these bulbs to you
now when you're planting onion sets just plant them not very deep but just so that
the top part of the onion set is visible and this will give you the
biggest bulbs from your onion plants and this is the other container that we'll be
growing our onion sets in this is a pretty wide container about six inches
deep and is really ideal for growing onion sets you can grow onions twice a
year in places like California you can plant them in the fall or early spring
for a spring harvest and you can also plant them in the spring season for a late summer
or fall harvest there are different onion varieties each onion variety has a
different maturity period so they take different times to reach maturity now
if you're using a slow-release fertilizer its a good time to mix it into your soil
because the onion sets will start sprouting very quickly as you can see
here within 10 days the sets have sprouted pretty well and are growing
very nicely so they will need the nutrients in the soil
if you're using liquid fertilizers you need to make sure that as soon as you
see these shoots coming up it's time to add some liquid fertilizer for your unions so
whether are using organic fertilizers or inorganic fertilizers remember that
fertilizers are very important for plants to grow well and produce whatever they're
producing whether its leaves or shoots or bulbs
so 30 days since planting you will see that the plants are well-established and if
some of your onions sets do not send out shoots it usually means that they have
being spoiled or rotting or they're just not viable so you can replace them with some
sets that are actually good and you can see it has produced this nice lush
green leaves and you can actually go ahead and harvest these leaves although
there are some onion varieties that are specifically bred for their leaves, I'v noticed
that almost any onion plants will give you nice and edible leaves and here you
can see we've harvested these leaves and the plant will grow back these
leaves in no time so do not worry about harvesting the leaves you can use
as many as you want and after 165 days it's now time for the harvest now
if you've watched my earlier videos on growing onions and I'll post a link to
those videos at the end of this video you might have known the technique that
you use to harvest onions and as you can see here you basically remove the
onions you can trigger dormancy by breaking their tops for some onion
varieties however I noticed that these onions were actually mature already and
that's why I began harvesting these onions right away so these containers
are very small as you can see and it was still a decent harvest and let's look at the
other container this was the wider container again not as tall or not as
deep, its about six to seven inches deep but still the onion bulbs were able to grow
very well in this container now when you're harvesting onions you might
notice that some bulbs might be smaller than the others and that's perfectly
normal when you're growing onions at home do not worry about that and once the
onions are ready and harvested you can dry them
in an open ventilated area like your garage now these onions have have been harvested
and are drying for about two to three weeks and you can use them as needed and they
will store very well for months to come
Now for our next variety of onions that is the red
burgundy onions which is one of my favorite onion varieties because it's
really pungent and really nice
will be using seeds so you can start onions about six to eight weeks before
your fall season or before your spring season because it takes about six to
eight weeks for the seeds to sprout and grow into these small plants which you
can easily transplant into your garden or into your containers, raised beds you
can grow onions pretty much in any medium that you want so we will sow a few seeds in
this seed starting kit and then wait for them to germinate and I'm keeping my
seed starting kit in a little green house and I've done a review of this
greenhouse, its a nice little green house that I've been using for many years now
so the plants are ready to be transplanted in about eight weeks as you
can see here these plants have grown pretty large and are now ready to be
transplanted and onions are very versatile plants they can be grown in any container
as long as it's about eight to 10 inches deep and wider containers are preferable
because they gave the onion plants a lot more area to grow well now onions taste
very different depending on their colors so the white and the red onions are
mostly pungent I usually like the pungent taste of both the white and the red
onions the yellow onions are more of the sweeter variety they taste a lot sweeter
and some people do like the sweet taste of those onions
so just like the white onion variety you can harvest the leaves of red burgundy
onion variety and what's interesting is that even the leaves of the onions taste a
little bit different depending on the onion variety and you can be the best
judge just take some leaves off the onions and cook them see how you find
it you can even even eat them raw, chopped, you can put them in salads you can put them in
soups there are a lot of things you can do with just the onion leaves as well and this is
one thing I like about growing onions you can harvest the onion leaves right
throughout the growing season and still get some good sized bulbs now this
burgundy onion variety is a smaller bulbing kind of onion which means that it won't
produce huge bulbs however it's much easier to grow and produces some really
delicious onions so here you see the step of inducing dormancy in these
onion plants so what you basically do is just bend the onion plants at their
necks and this triggers dormancy and tells the plant to stop producing leaves
and concentrate its energy on the bulbs so this increases the bulb size slightly
for these onions and after a few days you can go ahead and harvest these onions and
as you can see these are not huge onions these bulbs are pretty small and
different onion varieties have different sized bulbs so make sure when choosing
your seeds that the kind of onions that you wanna grow is a large bulbing
kind of onion or small to medium sized onions and there is no onion better or
worse than the others they're just different these onions taste absolutely
amazing my favorite again is the Burgundy onion variety it not only looks
very good
these onions look pretty amazing when they are sliced they also taste very nice and as I
mentioned it's up to your taste you want to grow sweeter onions you can grow the yellow
variety if you want the more pungent varieties
you can grow the white and the Burgundy onions and what do you do after
harvesting is that you remove the roots and the tops of the plant and then once
that's done you will be curing them and curing onions just means that after the
harvest you dry the onions and you make it ready for storage so the first
step in curing is to just sun-dy these onions for a few days you do not
have to keep it out in the Sun for a very long time especially if you have
very hot summers but you can dry these until the outer surface of the onions starts
becoming brittle and then keep it a well ventilated area about two weeks
and this is what the onions look like after two weeks again these are small to
medium sized onions and they will stored great for a few weeks or even a few
months ahead I'd like to know from you for what onion varieties do you like to grow and
I'll see you again soon
happy gardening
