Onions are a garden staple. They’re one of the most common vegetables used in cooking world wide, so it makes sense that you’d want to grow these in your garden. In addition to being a fantastic food, onions can also help prevent the appearance of some mammalian garden pests that don’t like the smell or taste of the plant.
Onion Details:
- Family: Amaryllidaceae
- Growing Season: Spring or fall depending on your zone
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 3-4 inches (7.5-10 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: 60-120 days for green onions, 100-150 days for fully matured onions
- Indoor Starting: Sow seeds in cells 6-10 weeks before last frost
- Earliest Planting: After danger of last frost
- Watering: Water roots when soil is dry, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Avoid watering the leaves. Do not over water. Onions take well to drip irrigation.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: plant starters (sets) ~1 inches (~2.5cm) deep covering the white of the set. Plant seeds 1/4 inch deep (~1cm). Don’t transfer starters until they are roughly as thick as a pen.
- Weeding: Onions have shallow roots, so early preventative weeding is the best. Weed daily where possible.
- Harvesting: To harvest green onions, simply pluck the plant from the ground, roots and all. To harvest fully mature onions, wait until their tops start to turn yellow, then bend the top over crimping it. Once crimped wait a few days before pulling the bulb, this lets the onion begin to form it’s outer skin. Hang unions to dry for one to 3 weeks before storing.
- Known Pests: Flies, cover onion bases with a light compost mulch to prevent eggs from being laid on the exposed root tops.
More About Onions
Onions come in a lot of different varieties for your garden. These are based on a few factors, such as the climate or zone you live in, but they can also come in varieties that change the flavor or the best time to pick your onions.
Short day varieties of onions are designed for southern climates while long day varieties are designed for northern climates. You can grow either in either place, but if you’re growing a lot of onions you’ll want to ensure that you’re choosing a variety suited to your region.
Onions also come in different colors, heights, and flowering varieties, but the species is a bit more diverse when you include it’s outlier the shallot.
Shallots are just specialized onions, though originally they were believed to be their own species. Genetic testing and cross-breeding eventually proved that they were just a highly specialized cultivar of onion with more of a garlic like taste in addition to their onion flavors.
Onion Tasting and Food Notes:
Onions are one of the most used vegetables in the world when it comes to cooking. While they are not often eaten on their own, they are used to develop flavors in other dishes. They are one of the three ingredients in mirepoix that help develop the signature tastes of french cooking. They also find themselves in just about every cultures food in some form or another. Asian dishes make use of onions just as frequently as Hispanic dishes do.
The ubiquity of the onion comes from its natural talent to pair with savory flavors while being quite strong and pungent on its own. Very few people will eat a raw onion whole, but at the same time nearly everyone can enjoy some onion in any dish that uses them.
The most common dish that has onion as the star of the flavor pallet would be traditional french onion soup. The soup is onion forward and like eating a raw onion, is not for everyone.
Should I Grow Onions In My Garden?
Given the widespread use and cultivation of onions, from a food use alone, we highly recommend everyone grow these. On top of their uses in the kitchen, onions are good at driving away some insect and mammalian pests that plague a garden. Onions are also easy to grow and can be sowed quite densely giving them a leg up on other plants you might choose for the garden. The only thing you need to keep in mind when deciding to plant onions is what variety you want to grow and how long they’re going to be in the ground. Sure they take a long time to come up, but they store well and are certainly worth planting!