Kitchen Garden Forum

I am really miffed.... an allotment neighbour (and good friend) has grown his onions from seed this year....in his greenhouse in plant pots....I have to say they looked magnificent
His only mistake was that he used 5'' pots and they proved to be too small, he has said that will be going to use 9'' next year.

I notice I wasn't the only plot-holder looking longingly and enviously at these beauties...now I have this 4' x 4' greenhouse that once my seeds have been extracted I can put to good use next year ....growing onions

Gosh, they must be the most expensive onions on the plots....

I should wait and see what they're like before following his lead, if they are grown too soft and hot the chances are they'll be either rotten or pithy in the middle and no good to man nor beast.

The only reason I can think for doing this is that he shows them and throws them. Onions are for eating.

MW

Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to to grow onions. Expensive in time watering and feeding; expensive in money in compost and plant food. I've seen magnificent onions grown in the open ground, which, whichever way you look at it, makes life a lot easier.
You don't say how big the onions are. A 5" pot indicates to me an onion slightly smaller than this, which isn't all that big.

I'd never grown onions before this year; I had no idea what I was up to I had a bag of Sturon onion sets out of the 99p shop and didn't really expect much. I started them off in cells in March & planted them out in the middle of the allotment at the end of April. I have to say, for a first effort I was totally knocked out. They grew beautifully - they are huge, (in my eyes) and taste really strong! The biggest weighs just over 1lb. I'm sure the proper gardeners will think this is titchy but I have been really surprised at my success. I will do exactly the same next year - no need for a greenhouse or much nurturing at all.

And also - I still have 1/2 a bag of the sets left - does anyone think it's worth using these again or will they have lost their magic?

At 99p? Get a fresh pack next year! They will have shrunk and dried up. Well done for growing good onions though!

MW

Good point.... I will ask him what the taste was like when I next see him.

I have to say this effort on his part was after a visit last year to see onions grown by a 'showman'...they were enormous in comparison

99p for a bag of onion sets, how many in the bag ?

My first batch of onion were grown from sets bought from Marshalls, they were a lot more expensive than 99p and didn't grow much bigger than what I consider a convenient size cooking onion which is about the size of onions I used to buy at the Co-op.

If I hadn't pulled them when I did I might have lost more to rot so all-in-all it's been an exciting but expensive process to produce. The red onion are even smaller but am I bothered about size ?

Does the size of an onion matter ?

Nice large mild onions i've always thought of as Spanish onion, I would like to grow a mild onion. What do I do ?

Ricard with an H wrote:99p for a bag of onion sets, how many in the bag ?

About 30 I think. More than enough for me anyway

Perhaps I am in a minority, but I don't WANT huge onions. Unless you have a large family still at home, you don't really need a cricket ball-size whopper, do you? I used to grow our onions (usually Rijnsburger Balstora) from seeds and sowed them in clumps, as recommended by Geoff Hamilton many years ago, thereby getting onions of different sizes from tiny to very large. Even then, many were too big to use in just one meal, so for the last few years, I have only cultivated shallots in summer, from seeds as well as from sets.

I still grow overwintering onions (Radar) because they fill the gap from about May to July and don't grow too large either.

In autumn 2012 I planted some shallots and garlic in pots in the cold greenhouse s well as outside and that was very useful because when I planted these out in early spring, they shot ahead of the others planted directly outside.

Monika wrote:Perhaps I am in a minority, but I don't WANT huge onions.

That was the point I was trying to make Monika, I would much rather have quality small to medium onions and I am considering growing shallots rather than onion on the next run. Are shallot more difficult ? Can I do over-winter shallot and I do like those cylindrical shaped shallots.

What I read was that it makes more sense to grow shallot than onion considering the price you pay. Yes ?

I guess it is these you are after



These are Cuisse de Poulet du Poitou Zebrune, seed purchased from Simpson's Seeds but others sell the same type.

I grow them roughly as described in this old thread viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7993&hilit=shallots though I now put 6 seeds in each flimsy pot. Sow wk 8 in heat, move into cold greenhouse or tunnel about wk 11, plant out wk 16 and harvest week 34. That string is about 7½ Kg.

They are exactly the ones I like but i'm not altogether sure why I prefer them. Maybe because they are a little bigger and a more convenient shape, do they taste any different ?

I prefer the idea of sets.

Last spring and into early summer I seemed to be surrounded my plants in pots I had raised from seed that needed daily attention. I lost a lot down to overcrowding and low temperatures together with an over-eager learning period, the few seeds I sowed direct and at the right time thrived and without all that potting and daily look-see to make sure they have just the right amount of water.

I need to get out more.

Ricard with an H wrote:I prefer the idea of sets.

Me too. I've always considered it to be kind of the point of shallots: plant one, which splits, yielding several. And it's so easy to do, requiring no fiddly sowing, compost, heat and all the folderol of raising stuff in modules attendant to the modern vegetable garden. But then I'm a bit old fashioned. The received wisdom was to plant on the shortest day (not, in the event, actually practical), keep them weeded, harvest on the longest day (ditto). What could be easier?

I grow shallots both from seed (usually Ambition) and sets (Jermor this year). I still sow the seeds in clumps which then push each other apart as they grow and, again, give bulbs of different sizes.