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 )