Onions
Ho-hee-ons.
Most people buy onion sets to onions grow from. Onion sets? Pah. All you get are crappy varieties and they are expensive to boot. Mainly the concerns I have is with the crappyness of the varieties, the only people producing onion sets are mass producers, so they just keep pumping out the same varieties every year. In supermarkets your buy to eat choice is usually between Red… or Normal, that’s it. Indijustifiable! I don’t know about you, but I want to know what other onions there are out there, what they look like, what they taste like! Who’s with me!? Dam those onion fascists. The only problem is, if you want a different onion, you have to grow them from seed. This is something else I’ve shied away from. I’ve always been lead to believe that in the first year of growing from onion seed you get a set and the second year the set grows into an onion. But is this a fib? I can see you need a long growing time, but my understanding now is that planting early enough you may have onions in late summer or autumn, but definitely the same year. THAT is what I want to prove to myself. If this works, it opens the doors to a whole world of new onion types and flavours. Plus, treated right, onions should keep well too. I’ll start all the seeds late winter to early spring in the box and then plant them out when the look big enough.
For my onion-y experiments I’ve chosen three types of seed:
Pink Ones – “Di Savona”
..The red skin is translucent, making the onion look almost pink with a mild and sweet flavour much prized in salads
Mmmm yum. These can be planted in autumn to over winter to have the earliest crop. With use of the box I can start another round of these at the end of the year to ready for next year.
Yellow Onion – “Yellow Sweet Spanish”
..Large round dark yellow bulbs sometimes weighing a pound or more. Sweet and mild flavoured to the point of eating them raw like an apple. Very successful if sown early in the season out-performing set-onions
You can see why I picked these. We will see if any of this comes true for us.
Japanese Onion – “Senshyu Yellow”
This one is more of a general onion. A “heavy yielding main crop” producing “straw coloured semi-globe shaped bulbs of high quality by early July”. Now, this is one of those over winter varieties, supposed to be sown in autumn. I’ll do that at the end of the year for next year, but for this year I wanted to see, if I sowed them at least late winter or early early spring what exactly I would have at the end of the year. This should make an interesting comparison and tell me how strict growing onion from seeds is to what types and times. Can I push the boundaries a little? Maybe it’ll just mean I have these later than normal, August September instead of July? Lets see what happens.
Like with all these types of seed, they sound great, but how well they actually grow, particularly considering they didn’t have my plot and my location in mind, is all to be seen. One day in the future, I’ll start collecting my own seed, that way, supposibly, over generations they adapted to my soil and climate. But for now, we’ll see how well this generally produced seed works. Some of the seeds I buy are from companies that have tried and tested them in british soil before putting them up for sale. Most noteworth of these is Real Seeds, check them out. Unfortunately they don’t sell these types of onion seed.
