Kitchen Garden Forum

This year I have nearly lost a good 50% of my stored onions although shallots and garlic are fine and they are stored in the same place.
I dried them as normal on the bed for a week , then left them in the conservatory for a few weeks to dry out well, rubbed off excess mud and skins and stored them . 6 weeks later I noticed lots of small black fruit flies and when fetching a onion to use found most had rotted away ...
This has never happened before.
Was it the flies fault or did they just come to the smell of rotting flesh ?
I was away for 6 weeks and I have no sense of smell hence why I didnt spot it earlier.
So any tips for the future or clues where I might have gone wrong ?

Sorry to have to say, you may have onion white rot. Starts rotting from the root plate and stinks. There is no antedote that I know of. The only queary is why the shallots haven't succumbed.

DON'T walk from the area where the the onions grew to where the shallots grew, you may transfer the spores. Cheers, Tony.

I don't think it sounds as if it will be white rot, thankfully, i'm sure there would have been signs of this when lifting.

There have been lots of people complaining about rotting onions in store this year, so i think it must be to do with growing conditions.
I'm sure if we get wet weather a couple of weeks before lifting, this seems to stop them storing so well. probably due to the amount of water they have taken up.

And i'm sure the flies will have been attracted to the rotting onion smell.

yes when I stored them they all looked fine ..... It was only after storage while I was away from home for 6 weeks that they went bad .
Next year I going to try the tights hanging method trouble is I dont wear them ...So boys got any spare ones ?
I think your right there was a lot of rain before I lifted them , maybe I didnt leave them out to dry long enough before storing them away ...
Oh well you live and learn.

I'll see if i had my hands on some.....

Thats the trouble when you get old .......You forget where you put everything including your hands !!!

Not sure what i was thinking there.

It was meant to say, i'll see if i can get my hands on some, but i'm not sure if that sounds a lot better...

We have had the same problem - we did lift them and bring them in before the rain came but in doing this they didn't get a chance to dry out properly outside and maybe were clustered too closely together when drying.

It isn't white rot as it starts from to stem end with a greyish mould. Some onions look just fine until they are peeled and then are starting to rot and go brown.

Mine seemed to take longer to dry out this year too. I went over them about a month after picking and split the thicker stems that were taking too long to dry so they dried back faster and this seemed to stop them rotting. I still lost four or five though.

Lost quite a few in storage this year when normally hardly lose any.

Dear All,
a tip to try and dry out onions for storage is to cut off the tops about 1-2" from the bulb and turn them upside down on wire netting or a rack to make sure that all moisture drains away from the bulb at the neck. Do this in a greenhouse or coldframe if you can to give them as much warmth as possible. If you have an electric fan or heater which can blow unheated air underneath the racking for a week or two then use it if the weather is damp. The quicker the necks dry out the better.
Regards Sally Wright.

Sally, mine have all rotted from the root plate, the tops were fine.

I had a few squidgy ones too. the garlic seems OK though thankfully.

We had the best onions and garlic ever this year - limited white rot and really good bulbs. Got rid of the few dodgy ones. No white rot or fungus - just dried out bulbs. Very dissapointing.

Will try again this year. Onion seed already sown. All ideas welcome!

We got the white rot in the neck of our onions due I think to the wet weather. So we picked them all early and put them in the polytunnel on the racks which we cut the tops of the onions off to about 2 " and then poked them through the mesh racks for a couple of weeks. Then strung them up and put them in the shed. But got caught out with a quick frost in November, which seemed to upset the lot of them. We lost quite a lot of the onions to horrible neck rot, which stinks.

Will do something different this year.