Onions Can Bring Tears to Your Eyes...

Growing onions can be confusing and try your patience, as listening to the above podcast will demonstrate. As our resident vegetable expert, Master Gardener Gail Pothour, knows first hand, growing green onions is a snap. But bulbing onions? Gail has more or less given up on trying to grow bulbing onions.

If you listened to the podcast before you started reading this, it should be pointed out that the bulbing onion trial conducted at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center more than 10 years ago that Gail mentions had some drawbacks, including starting from seed (which requires a lot of patience and the results can be widely variable), and, they were all started at the same time - in August - and not transplanted into the raised beds until November. That’s three months that it took for those onion seeds to produce seedlings to get to a transplantable size, about the thickness of a pencil.