How to make your own onion sets

008

For a couple years now I have attempted to start onions from seeds and the same thing happens each year.  All is going well, good strong seedlings, then I run out of space in my grow box and the poor seedlings get kicked out to fend for themselves a few weeks to early leading to very few survivors.

This summer I decided to try something new, during the end of July I spread onion seeds generously over about two square feet of my garden.  Now after a month and a half I have some nice little onion seedlings coming up.

007

I plan on keeping them in the ground until after the first frost the leaves will go yellow/brown and I will harvest my onion sets and lay them out to dry for a few days and store them in an old mesh container where I have bought onion sets a couple of years ago.  Where I can replant them this spring as soon as the soil can be worked.

The benefits of growing your own onion sets is you can grow varieties from species that you can not find even at your favorite online seed company.  Obviously the sets are also much cheaper than buying them already in the set form.  You can grow the onion sets to the specific size you want, which is important because small onion sets grow up to be onion bulbs with the larger ones growing up to become onion flowers.

The best part of this with the amount of rain we have been getting here in the Pacific Northwest the past month, I haven’t even had to water these seeds, so other than a few minutes of sprinkling the seeds, no real effort on my side.

4 Responses to “How to make your own onion sets”

  1. Onion Sets: How to Make Your Own Says:

    […] via How to make your own onion sets. […]


  2. mike Says:

    How about an update to this? How did the sets fare over the winter? How many and how large? I’m also curious whether they go to see this coming summer.


  3. Forsythkid Says:

    Great article. I was late getting sets from the local store where I live in SW Missouri and am looking for alternatives other than paying high shipping costs to order them on line!


  4. Lisa Says:

    How did it go? I am about to try the same thing. Did the onion sets store well?


Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

IKE