GROWING BIG BULB ONIONS FROM SEED TO HARVEST

we will look at how easy it is to grow fresh onions in your garden. Growing onions is not only easy but also a cheap way to get fresh onions so we will be looking at the hybrid granex yellow onions today the onion seeds are pretty tiny as you can see here and and there are multiple ways to start onions your can sow them in a seed starting mix and as you can see here these have been growing in a seed starting kit and you can use pretty much any kind of soil and these plants will remain like these for a long time so this is a good idea if you wanna space out your planting as these onions will grow for a long time inside these small containers and when you're ready you can transplant them so we've sown our seeds directly in the ground and what you're looking at is about ten days since sowing now this onion type which is the yellow hybrid granex is a short day onion which means that it grows best when the days are short so that is the reason we are growing this onion variety in November so it's gonna grow through the short days from November thru late spring or early summer as you will see here do so let's talk a little about the kind of soil I used for these onions so I used a compost rich soil which is a combination of a lot of compost that I made myself as well as some ready to use potting mix and in this case the potting mix that I had was from a brand called sta-green which you can find easily at your local garden stores so I was able to find the potting mix at Lowes and this is what I use here and this potting mix already has some fertilizer added in so what I had to do was just use this potting mix add some of my own compost and also some all-purpose organic fertilizer and then I was good to go So around mid January your plants should look much more sturdy than what they were over in the past month and in the winters the soil is usually a little hard and winters are not a good time to add any more anymore fertilizer to your plants and I know a lot of people know that onions are heavy feeders which means that they need a lot of fertilizer but if you have a good potting mix if you use a lot of compost and your started with some organic fertilizer which is slow release by nature you do not need to add a lot of fertilizer at tall at least not during the first few months the fertilizer that you added during the start should be enough for the plants to grow to their full size and it's only around spring that you would start thinking about adding anymore fertilizer to your plants so just give them water about two or three times a week you can even give it less often during the winters if your temperatures don't go high but in California we did get some high temperatures this winter which is why we have to water these plants about two times or maybe three times a week as well now in the month of March is when the onions will really start to grow very vigorously and you will see a remarkable difference in the way the onions grow almost every week and remember that these are short day onions so you need to make sure that they are planted in full Sun because in the winters the sun is not very powerful so you need to make sure that these plans do not grow in a lot of shade you will start seeing that the bottom part of the plants now start becoming a little thicker and this is because the leaves have already been formed and now the plant start sending energy towards developing really nice bulbs which will eventually form onions now some of you have asked me a question that when growing onions is it okay to remove the top part of the plant the leaves and cook them or eat them in any way and the answer to that is whether or not you do that the onions are gonna grow the same way so if you like eating the leaves of the plants do go ahead and harvest them you can safely eat them without causing a lot of difference to the way the onions grow now while the plants are growing if you see any kind of stunted growth or yellowing of leaves are any kind of symptom that makes you feel that you need to add a little more fertilizer you can give it a nice bath of liquid seaweed or fish fertilizer mix together and this will really rejuvenate them [music] Mid-April is probably the time you can heave a sigh of relief because all the onion plants that you planted now start looking more like onions rather than just leaves so you can see that the onion bulbs have started forming and this usually means that the bulbs will now start growing bigger and the energy of the plant will now get concentrated in the bulb and this is a really nice way by which at the life cycle of an onion keeps going first the platforms these nice leaves and then the energy is spent and developing the bulbs So in May early summer here in California the onions are ready for harvest and as you can see what I'm doing here is just uprooting these onions just leaving them right there in place now you can either leave them like this for about a week or so for them to dry or what you can do is just uproot them and then take them to a separate location and then dry them for about a week now that reason I am removing these onions and then taking them away is because I wanna start using this bed for the next crop because it's already summer and I'm very eager to start my summer crops now so I will be removing all these onions first and then moving them to a separate location now once the onions have dried a little bit what you can do is just chop up the roots and the tops of the plant because you don't need them anymore and this also makes it easier for you to store the onions now you look at the size of these onions they're pretty big and if your are growing onions the right way use good potting mix use a good organic fertilizer and then just take care of maintaining your plants you will get some nice big onions as a reward so as you can see here most of these onions are the yellow hybrid granex onions and you can also see some red onions here the red burgundy onion and I'll probably make a separate video of growing the red burgundy onions so so these are the onions that I got from A 4 foot by 4 foot raised bed and these onions were planted probably about four to six inches apart and as you can see are really good sized onions most of these are big sized onions you might get some small ones as well and to store onions I usually leave them in a nice well ventilated space like my garage and these onions should stay here for a long time till you finish using them so I'd like to know from you what do you think about growing onions do like to grow them do you like to grow them from seed or from sets Do let me know and I'll see you again soon Happy Gardening!