Grow + Harvest: Onions From Seed

And how doing this taught me that friends are actually important in life...

Once the most disappointing things in the garden, onions, are now one of my favorite crops to sow, tend to, harvest, and preserve for winter. I’m surprised we got to this place, to be honest, because it wasn’t looking good for a while.

When I first saw what an onion seed looked like I couldn’t believe that tiny black dot would reliably grow into the most important player in my kitchen game (onions are what makes everything good and I will die on this hill). I had no faith in that tiny seed, and even less when I saw the tiny green seedling thread pop out of the soil. I was sure I’d done something wrong, that the seeds were bad, or my starting soil was bad, or that I was just bad. Bad bad bad. I think the frail onion seedlings felt my negativity because they wilted over and died. Either that or I stopped watering them.

Then I learned about onion sets and I thought to myself, “oh this is what everyone is doing to get big beautiful onions!”. So I got a big bag of tiny onions, a bit confused about the whole concept of planting an onion to grow an onion, but I stuck each one in the ground optimistically. They grew, but not impressively, and many of them flowered, which made my garden look good and the bees happy, but it did not fill my root cellar with the braids of bulbous alliums that I’d been dreaming of and had seen on all my farm history shows.

I was about to write off growing good onions completely in my head as “not for me” when I started to learn about Charles Dowding and his multi-sowing method. I follow his entire no-dig garden method and it has changed my life, but that’s a conversation for another day. Charles is a proponent of multisowing for various crops, including onions, leeks, beets, peas, and more. He’s got a great chart here if you’re interested in his recommendations for number of seeds per clump. The benefits for multisowing, he says, are:

• Grow more plants in the same area of propagating space.

• Use less compost to propagate the same number of plants.

• Save time because you are planting two or more at once.

• There is a companion effect: I observe how plants like being with their friends in clumps.

  - Charles Dowding, Multisowing

I don’t have a ton of gardening space, so the idea of maximizing my yield with this technique had me really excited. That, and I just tend to believe everything Charles says. He comes off as one of the most sincere and kind individuals on the planet. I could fangirl for the rest of this article, but let’s get back to the onions. 

I tried my first round of multisowing onions 3 years ago. Onion seeds were surprisingly quite hard to come by here in Slovenia. I had to order them online and the pickings were slim. Bags of onion sets were in every grocery store, but I was determined to grow a decent onion from seed. The first year, I planted a patch of multisown onions from seed and another of single onion sets, just to test. They grew more or less similarly but I did note that the seedlings themselves were significantly stronger than they had been when I tried to grow them before. Over the last 3 years my collection of onion seeds has grown significantly, and so has my faith in this method. This year I prioritized my onion crop, dedicating two large beds to several varieties (including the famous Tropea onion from Calabria) and I learned a lot from my efforts. 

Several times this year I thought that my onion seedlings were done for, due to unseasonable heat in my seed house (I should share my seed house soon - it’s truly one of the best things we’ve ever built), but they kept trucking along. I planted some sad-looking clumps in the ground with a hope, a prayer, and a good spray of water and was really shocked to see them extremely healthy and happy a few weeks later. Maybe they really can handle more when they’re with their friends. Perhaps that’s the life lesson that onions are trying to teach me, a person who absolutely prefers to be alone most of the time, that we do thrive more in community, in clumps with our friends. Maybe we rally as well with the support of our people around us. How do we find those people? Well, I suppose the onion seeds didn’t choose to be in the clump together, did they? They just became…”friends”, as Charles says.

Regardless, my weary onion friend clumps rallied beautifully, and once harvest time came around, I was so excited to declare that these were the biggest onions I’d grown to date. 

They’re currently finishing curing under our awning. I’ve already braided a few bunches, which are hanging in our cool root cellar and I’ll bring each plait up to hang in my kitchen as I need them, which is something that warms me deeply in the dead of winter, while I chop them up as the base of soups, stews, onion-eggs (a family recipe), and more. 

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Multisown Onion Life Lesson:

Being in a clump, or rather, friends/people are important, especially when going through the hard stuff. Onions seem to understand that friends are vital, so we should too. And don’t be picky, just be good to the people around you. Bloom where you’re planted, and all that. Also, a tiny seed and a seemingly frail seedling can grow into a fundamental crop that stores for an entire year in a root cellar. Small, seemingly impossible things, sometimes make the biggest and most unexpected impact (she says as she writes this newsletter to all of 9 subscribers).

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Onion varieties we grew this year:

• Ailsa Craig

• Tropea Rossa Lunga

• Rijnsburg

• Di Genova Red

• Red Ninja Bunching

• White Lisbon Bunching

• Ramata di Milano (pictured below)

  

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For now, I’m very happy with my method of onion growing. I’d like to learn to intentionally bolt them and collect seeds, as well as to grow proper onions from sets, because I like a challenge. Maybe next year.

How do you grow onions? What are your tried and true techniques? Seeds or sets? Favorite varieties and onion-forward recipes?