Onions are something we use a lot of. I once took the time to estimate how many onions we go through in a month when buying them from a store, and calculated an estimate of how many we would need to plant to meet our needs. I think it came out to something like 200 yellow onions. That did not include red onions, which we bought less frequently. It also didn’t include shallots, which we rarely bought, because they are so expensive.
Which meant that, if we wanted to grow enough onions for the four of us for one year, we’d need to plant more than 200 yellow onions because, once we have them handy, we would probably be using them even more often than we normally do.
Plus the red onions.
Plus we wanted to plant shallots, because they are so expensive, but we like them.
With onions, we could buy sets for easier planting. A lot of sets. Or, we could start them from seed. Seeds would cost less than sets, plus we would have more varieties to choose from.
For our geographical area in Canada, we need to choose long day onions. Until I started growing them myself, I didn’t even know there were such things as long day, short day and day neutral onions!
As shown in a video in the Best Laid Plans post, we also need to start seeds indoors very early. Onions need a much longer growing season than we have.
We chose two red varieties, one yellow, plus shallots for this year. In the red onions, we’d grown Red of Florence successfully before. We like the taste of them, and their elongated bulb shape makes them easier to cut up compared to round bulbs. I also bought some Red Whethersfield to try, choosing them for their purported storability, as well as their flattened shape. With the yellow onion, we tried a new variety called Talon. The shallots variety we tried before wasn’t available, so we got the Ambition shallot to try.
All of these were started in January, and they sprouted very quickly in our large aquarium greenhouse!
Over time, we shifted some into them small aquarium greenhouse, because we needed the space.
With the issues we had starting seeds indoors and destructive cats, we also began our plans to turn the living room into a cat free zone. This required not only making a door that would keep the cats out while not being a permanent addition, but also a sort of window to block an opening in one of the shelves that act as room dividers. Protecting the seedlings in the aquarium greenhouses and the covered mini greenhouse we have was not good for the seedlings, as it was hard to give them the air circulation they need. By the time we had to move the first batch of seedlings out of the aquarium greenhouses and start other seeds, the barrier was built, and we now have a cat free zone!
With so many onion seeds to start, we went with densely sowing them, which I talk about in this post, including videos from MI Gardener explaining the technique. All the varieties grew very well, very quickly!
Since we had so many onions to transplant, we didn’t plan on dedicating entire beds to them. Instead, they were mostly planted as borders, where we hoped they would also do double duty as insect and deer repellers.
There was just enough Red Whethersfield onions to encircle the Roma VF tomato bed.
The Talon onions encircled the other two beds with tomatoes, with the last few going into the ends of the high raised bed.
In the above Instragram slideshow, you can see the Red Whethersfied and Talon onions around each of the tomato beds.
With the Red of Florence, they ended up all over the place! Some shared grow bags with peppers.
Others got planted between rows of spinach.
There were so many Red of Florence seedlings, it was hard to find space for them. After the spinach was harvested for the season, we still had seedlings left, and most of them went in where the spinach had been, leaving us with one bed dedicated to just those onions. We still had onion seedlings left over, including some of the yellow onions . By this point, they were the last little, spindly seedlings that we probably shouldn’t have bothered transplanting. Those ended up getting transplanted into the bed where we had peas and greens at the chain link fence.
Then there were the shallots. They got their own little bed, with a few last ones tucked into the end of the wattle weave bed.
That bed ended up needing extra protection! The cats just wouldn’t stay out of it.
Once the open ends of the cover got chicken wire over them, we could finally keep the cats out of there!
So, how did the onions and shallots turn out?
With the Red Whethersfield, not at all.
I have no idea what happened to them. They were there and growing, and then just basically disappeared. Not a single transplant made it. It was really quite strange!
The seedlings planted in the bed along the chain link fence never really grew at all, with most of them dying off. That was not a surprise, really, considering how small those seedlings were.
The Talon onions around the tomato beds and in the high raised bed did better.
This picture is of the last of the yellow onions that got harvested, being left to cure. They were later braided to hang in the house. As I write this, there’s still a few left. Oh, there were a few other yellow onions in the high raised bed that were harvested later. They were still growing so well, we left them as long as possible before harvesting them.
The Red of Florence did a lot better, in most places. The ones in the grow bags were smaller, but those were where we turned out to have issues with fine tree roots making their way into the soil from below. The ones planted in between the spinach got quite large, with the ones transplanted after the spinach was harvested only somewhat smaller. We got a lot of onions out of that bed!
That bed was left until after the first few frosts before it was harvested completely. We already had some cured and braided indoors, but these last ones were still actively growing and would not have cured properly, so most of them ended up chopped up and in the freezer, with some set up to dehydrate in the oven.
Now, every time we open up the chest freezer, we get a strong smell of onions!
With the dehydrated onions, I ended up using our spice grinder and powdering about half. I think I like the onion powder more than the dehydrated pieces.
As for the shallots, they turned out to have self seeded company! Even though the soil in that bed was completely reworked, with fresh garden soil added, they still had seeds from years gone by in them. Specifically, dill and poppies. We’d planted Giant Rattle Poppies in this space before the little raised bed was built, so I left the poppies to grow. The self seeded dill keeps coming up every years, but never gets particularly large, but we still like to harvest the leaves for cooking, so I left those, too. The poppies grew so tall they started growing through the chicken wire of the cover, making moving it for weeding pretty much impossible. When they started blooming, we realized they were a completely different type of poppy, that my mother grew at some point! No Giant Rattle Poppy seeds seemed to have survived. 😄
When it came time to harvest the shallots, I actually left them be until the poppy pods were dried out. Once I could harvest the pods, the cover could be removed and the shallots finally harvested. They were smaller than they should have been, likely because they had so much competition for water and nutrients, but still pretty good. We got a decent amount to harvest and, as I write this, we still have some left.
Final thoughts on onions and shallots
It’s a given that we will be planting onions again next year. We will probably get more Red of Florence seeds again, as they do so very well.
I want to try the Red Whethersfield again and hopefully actually get some to taste! I’m still somewhat perplexed as to why they to utterly failed, but I suspect it has more to do with the growing conditions in that bed, then anything else.
We definitely need to plant more yellow onions, though. There turned out to be fewer seeds in the package than I expected. I need to pay more attention to seed counts! The Talon onions did all right, but they did not reach their full size potential. In fact, we only got a couple among the tiny ones planted in the high raised bed that got really big. This would be due to growing conditions and compacted soil, which we have issues with.
I want to do shallots again, though I might try a different variety, as we’re still in the “what kind do we like?” stage.
Which means I need to choose and order seeds soon, because we’re coming up on December in a few days, and we need to get seeds started in January! In fact, we could actually get them started in December and not go wrong.
At some point, we will try growing green bunching onions again, and I want to grow leeks, but those will wait until we’ve had more time to improve and amend our soil, and build more higher raised beds. Soil compaction is one of the major obstacles we have to deal with before we can grow those successfully.
All in all, onions, shallots and garlic will probably remain a staple in our garden, every year.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 
I enjoyed reading your gardening story! Onions and garlic are some of my favorite things. Always good to have lots of garlic and onions on hand. 🙂
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Thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying it. 😊
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