Growing Onions - a sad tale

Growing onions can be disappointing. I'd planted these particular onions from seed rather than sets. I thought it would be fun to have a go and I was very pleased when my little seedlings showed every sign of growing into fine onions that would see me through the winter.
Preparing the plot and planting
In the Fall after I cleared away the pea plants I prepared my plot. I mixed in some manure and added some spent mushroom compost. Then I left the frosts to do their work. In the Spring I waited until the soil was starting to warm up and was a little moist but not sodden. I gently firmed the row by treading on it and planted my seeds in two rows about 15" apart. I placed the seeds on the soil about 1" apart and then covered them with a mix of soil and spent mushroom compost to a depth of about 1/2".
Growing and thinning
Soon they rewarded me with a row of closely packed young onions. These I thinned out to about 8" apart give them room to bulk up. I never mind thinning onions because you can just eat the thinning like scallions! I was lucky too because they were healthy and didn't attract the attentions of the dreaded onion fly.
All through the Spring and Summer I watched them grow and fatten up. I thought happily of all those lovely onions hanging in my shed.
Disaster Strikes
Until the awful day when I suddenly noticed they even though they were nearly ready they were putting up more green shoots. All that energy that had been stored in those lovely fat bulbs was being used to make flower shoots. Eek!
20/20 Hindsight
If only I'd known. There had been a long, dry, sunny period followed by a couple of weeks when the rain had been relentless. My onions had responded by getting ready to make flowers. I'd been waiting for the stalks to start to brown before turning them down and my onions had taken their chance and 'bolted'. I know now that what I should have done was watched them carefully during the wet weeks and at the first sign of secondary growth on one or two plants I should have folded all the stems over and genlty tied them in place. It was a hard lesson but onion flowers are very pretty. They are just not as tasty as onions!
It is one lesson I might not have had to learn if I'd read more about it because then I'd have known that onions sets are specially treated with cold to stop them bolting and that's why I'd never had the problem before.
(picture originally uploaded to Flickr under a CC license )

Growing Onions - the best reason for doing it.

When I first thought about growing onions I was really unsure what was the best way to start. I wondered if I should grow them from seed or buy onion sets from a nursery. I worried what was the best variety to choose. But I always knew what I wanted to be the outcome. I wanted my kids to know that the best food doesn't come off a supermarket shelf. It comes from planting and tending for something yourself and from that satisfied feeling that your stock of winter food is stored out back. I wanted to give them that sense of comfort that comes from growing food to see you through the dark days. But that wasn't the only reason.

The Best Reason for Growing Onions
When I was a kid I used to play in my grandfather's old wooden garage out back in his yard. Now this garage was a magical place to a kid. The car didn't live in there, the garage was too full of stuff for that. There was a old wooden bench, woodworking tools, nails and screws of every size in neatly labeled coffee jars. There was a light dusting of sawdust on the floor There were big baskets that hung from the roof and were filled up with apples every Fall. The other things that hung from the rafters in the late Fall were strings of big, juicy, beatiful onions. The two smells mixed and mingled together, the ripe apples and the drying onions, to me they bring back that very special place and time. I learned to use a hammer and nails, how to saw a piece of wood, how to listen and take instructions in that old garage. I wanted my shed to smell like that and to be a place where my kids could learn about growing stuff and making stuff.

My grandfather grew two kinds of onion. There were the little fierce ones that my grandmother paid me to peel. They were for pickling in white vinegar. My eyes still smart at the thought of them! But those pickles were the best I ever had and it was a great way to make a bit of extra pocket money.

The other kind of onions he grew were huge round ones. His party trick, one of the many, was to cut one of these huge, juicy guys off of the rope and bite right into it! He'd eat it just like an apple! My friends would look on horrified and back away if he offered them a slice. Then he'd give me a bit and I'd chomp away with a big grin on my face, because those onions were as sweet, or maybe even sweeter than the apples.

What Happened When I Grew My Own Onions
I decided to try growing some of those big, sweet onions. I had a lot of trouble tracking them down but eventually I found some called Vidalias (Yellow Granex F1 Hybrids). The description sounded about right and the picture was a big, round, onion, just like the ones I remembered.
I couldn't get seeds so I sent off for a bunch of young plants and I never regretted it. They grew into mouth-watering, big juicy onions and at the end of the season I plaited them into ropes and hung them on the shed to dry. They hung from the roof of the shed all winter and every time I cut some for the pot it took me back to those happy days.

Why Don't You Try Growing Onions?
So if you would like to have a go at growing onions, just like I did? I'm sure you won't regret it!