What to do in your January garden? Plant onions!
January 6, 2015 | By webadmin
What are we thankful for in this New Year? We’re thankful we live in a climate where year-round gardening is a reality. 12-months of the year, we can plant perennials, seasonal color, bulbs, trees, shrubs and our favorite … edibles! We hope we’ve encouraged you to add herbs and vegetables among your annuals and perennials to add flavor, texture and fragrance throughout your landscape. Edibles also make beautiful additions to containers.
While January might seem like a gardening dead-zone, there is actually more you can do than you might realize. If you enjoy vegetable gardening, you can continue planting leafy greens such as kale, cabbage, salad greens and kohlrabi. January is also the time to plant a very important crop that you get only one chance a year to plant: Onions!
January is the time to set out onion transplants, also called slips. These are young seedlings that haven’t yet formed a bulb. Now is the time you’ll find onion slips available at your local garden center. In order for your onions to receive the proper temperature and daylength signals, which is what makes them form a bulb, it’s best to plant your onions by the end of January. When choosing onions online or in-store, you will get a choice of either long day or short day onions. Here in North Texas, short day onions produce best. If you want to plant onions from seed, you’ll need to do that in October.
To plant, follow these easy steps:
- Plant into well amended, loose, fertile soil. Add compost, lava sand and a quality organic fertilizer to encourage healthy roots.
- Use a pencil and push it into the soil about one to two-inches. You’ll want to plant the slip only as deep as the white growth at the base. Place one onion slip per hole, roots down, then gently pat in.
- Plant four to five inches apart in rows 12-inches apart. Or, plant among your existing perennials and annuals!
- Onions need regular water in order to develop a fully formed bulbs. Water thoroughly, but be sure not overwater such that the soil is washed away from the baby bulbs.
- Onions are heavy Nitrogen feeders. You’ll add your first application of fertilizer about three weeks after planting, and then reapply every 2 weeks. You’ll stop adding fertilizer about 4-weeks before harvesting, or when the neck of the bulbs begin to soften.
Flowering & Harvesting: if you want to harvest green onions, then you should plant extra slips. You can begin harvesting about 4-5 weeks after planing. Do not harvest the greens off of plants you want to develop bulbs.
You’ll harvest full size onion bulbs in early summer before plants attempt to flower. Flowering is not something you want happening on your onion plants. Onions are biennials - that means they’ll grow vegetatively the first year and then flower the second year. Sometimes onions can be triggered into flower early if they’ve been exposed to fluctuating warm and cold temperatures. It makes them think they’ve gone back into dormancy, then back into a new active growing season, which triggers them to flower. If they’re flowering, then they aren’t forming a bulb. You can typically prevent your onions from flowering by planting the right types at the right time; and by planting only slips that are no bigger than the size of a pencil. Plant too early, too late or too big, and you could end up with flowers but no onion bulbs.
While we don’t want our bulbing onions going to flower, remember that there are many other Allium relatives that make beautiful blooming perennials in the garden.
We’ll talk about how to “cure” onions in summer on this blog just before harvest time so be sure to check back. Until then, keep up to date with our blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed for more tips on which edibles to plant through the year!
