Onions In the Ground

Early spring is the time of the year when gardening slowly begins to take off.  I like to plant early season crops as soon as I can to give them plenty of time to grow before the weather gets too hot for them.  Overwintered crops like spinach and garlic are the first to make an appearance and they are the cue for me to start getting other things in the dirt like my onions.

The weather was looking like we were going to have a string of nice days for a little while so I took the opportunity to plant my onions.  I am still devoting two small beds to onions this year - one is planted in sets and the other is planted with seeds.  This is the first year that I am trying to direct seed some of my onions into the bed in an attempt to save time transplanting onion starts later.  I usually have pretty good luck planting sets, but I don't think they keep as well, so I want to be able to compare onions started from seeds to onions started from sets.  A friend of mine said that she had great success direct seeding her onions in the spring, so I am hoping that I will too.

The bed that I planted with seeds is half yellow onions and half red onions.  The bed planted with sets is about half yellow onions, a quarter red onions and a quarter shallots.  The shallots were the biggest roundest shallots that I had left over from last year's harvest and I saved them for the sole purpose of replanting them this spring.  I don't eat a ton of shallots, but I do like them so I decided that they could have some space in my garden again this year.

When I plant sets I space them about three to four inches apart.  Onions don't have a big root system and planting them close together gives them a better chance of out-competing any weeds that pop up in their bed.  I give shallots a little more space so they can spread out a little more.  I try to plant them with an eight inch spacing.  Planting onions seeds is a little harder and I probably have one to two inch spacing in that bed.  If they need thinning, then I will just harvest them as green onions early in the season to allow others the space they need to grow big.