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Post by chrysanthemum on May 12, 2022 19:14:07 GMT -6
macmex, that caterpillar story makes me shudder. That sounds pretty horrible. heavyhitterokra, thanks for the information about thrips. I’m thinking now that my garlic may have had thrips as well. I attributed its problems to our strangely warm December and really hard freeze in January. It had been doing well prior to that point, but afterwards it just never thrived. I just harvested the last of it as all the stalks were down and drying. I had some that never formed cloves, only rounds. Other heads did form cloves but none were really good sized. We have a lot of onions in the ground right now. I’m not sure how quickly we’ll go through them. Last year we ate them all fresh for the most part, so this year I planted three times as many. How quickly do the thrips cause deterioration? I do have freezer space, so I can chop and freeze them if that’s necessary.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 12, 2022 20:14:36 GMT -6
I guess the storage problems depend on how far the thrips burrow into the onion's neck? There is no particular time frame, they just don't make the entire winter before they start getting mushy around the top where the neck is attached.
I've never seen thrips on garlic before. That doesn't mean anything though. I don't raise much garlic because my wife doesn't like to eat it or cook with it. if I want something with garlic in it I have to fix it myself and eat all of it myself.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 22, 2022 15:34:46 GMT -6
We harvested our Texas Legend onions yesterday. There were a bunch of small ones and none that were really huge. It was definitely not as good an onion year as last year. I don’t know if it was just the roller-coaster winter weather, the drought, the spring heat, the thrips, or all of the above. Nevertheless we did get onions, and they taste good. We also have three more beds of other varieties of onions still maturing, so there are more to come.  These rickety old sawhorses were left on the property when we moved in a few years ago. We haven’t used them for anything, but yesterday we put them under a lean-to roof on our barn. We figured it was sheltered from the sun and had good airflow, so it would be a good place to cure onions. |
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 22, 2022 19:38:06 GMT -6
Those onions are beautiful!
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Post by woodeye on Jun 30, 2022 13:59:08 GMT -6
Nice looking onions, chrysanthemum!
heavyhitterokra, i haven't grown onions for about 4 years now because I quit gardening altogether when the deer ate all of my turnip patch. Candy onions were my favorite. I enjoyed planting the things, mostly because I bought one of those Stand 'n Plant Seeders so that I didn't have to crawl to plant onions. Those things are fun to use, by the way. Anyway, I usually planted 15 or 20 bunches, only because the price per bunch gets lower. They still ended up costing about $3 a bunch delivered.
I ate all the onions I could stand every year, then froze all my freezer could hold, and gave the rest away to friends and family.
I guess I got lucky though, I never had the thrips problem.
When I was a kid we bought onion plants for 15¢ a bunch and sold them for 15¢ a lb. Boy how times change...
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 1, 2022 12:11:30 GMT -6
We used to plant dried onion sets, the kind you see for sale in bulk that look like little dried onion bulbs. We'd plant about a thousand of them, then sell cleaned, green, onions for 10 cents each. I'd sell a 5-gallon bucket full of them every Saturday morning until I ran out of onions.
I'd also plant about 5,000 Candy onions and harvest them for sale after the tops were dried and removed. I don't remember what we charged for them. but we sure did sell a lot of them.
Candy onions were the best! They're getting hard to find nowadays though. The last batch I had, I ordered from Dixondale Farms. They used to be $60.00 per case in the 30 bunch cases. I see now that they are North of $94.00 per case. I only planted one bunch of onions this year. I had too many other things going on at the time and that's all I could squeeze in.
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Post by woodeye on Jul 1, 2022 12:29:30 GMT -6
That's where I goofed, I've planted those onion sets several times, but I always tried to let them grow to big onion size. Which they never really did. And they turned out to be such hot onions that all you do was use them for cooked onions. I'll try the onion sets again, but just for green onions. 
As for the Candy onions, mercy, 5,000 of those would be a monumental task to plant. The most I ever planted was about 1,000. Another thing about those Candy onions, deer like the tops of them. I had 4 varieties of onions growing, all in the same garden spot. The deer came in and ate the tops off the Candy onions, but didn't touch the 10-15's, the red onions, or the bermuda onions. 
I bought my Candy onions from Brown's of Omaha, TX
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 1, 2022 12:51:03 GMT -6
Everything likes to eat Candy onions. I had grasshoppers eat them clear down below the ground during the grasshopper plague of 2012. I'd go out to the garden and find round holes where my onions used to be. All that was left by then was the onion skin chewed down below the soil line. This year is proving to be just like that. I lost an entire row of potatoes and cabbage to grasshoppers already. All that's left of the potato plants.
 This is my cabbage.
 More cabbage.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jul 5, 2022 6:32:31 GMT -6
Yesterday my youngest son and I gathered all our cured onions and removed the dried leaves and roots and separated them into baskets for storage. There weren’t that many, and most weren’t big, but it’s something. We still have Red Creole onions in their beds. They should have matured by now, but they haven’t bulbed significantly and are showing no signs of softening at the neck. We’re wondering if they’ve just somehow gone dormant because of the drought or something. I’ve cleared as much space as I can around them for sweet potatoes (they’re in the bed where I planned to plant all my slips), but I’m thinking of just pulling the rest even if they’re not so great just to get the rest of my slips in. I thought I’d have the onions out by May, and here it is July. What a strange gardening year I’ve had!
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Post by woodeye on Sept 18, 2022 11:32:22 GMT -6
Found a picture of how I used to plant Candy onions. I miss planting onions! Anyway, I planted these Candy onions one foot apart. (a play on words)
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Post by hmoosek on Sept 18, 2022 13:51:35 GMT -6
One foot apart!!!! Hahahahaaaa
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Post by chrysanthemum on Sept 18, 2022 21:18:29 GMT -6
You made me laugh at that one, woodeye, and then just gape in astonishment at the size of those onions. Wow! I did end up pulling my mysterious red onions that remained solid at the neck so late in the season. It turns out that they had sent up a flower stalk to, but they never actually showed a flower at the top, so I didn’t know they had bolted. Others in that bed I had pulled much earlier and chopped up for the freezer because I knew they wouldn’t store. With these, I lost more of them to rot because I waiting so long not knowing that they had bolted. I’m going to blame the roller coaster weather this winter, the drought, and the excessive heat this summer, not to mention thrips. It was not a good onion year for me. At the same time I still have yellow and white onions in my pantry that are keeping just fine, so it wasn’t a total failure, and I made some containers of frozen onion and some delicious onion powder from the ones that we knew had bolted. We’ve decided not to buy more transplants this year (not that there was any fault with the transplants; it just costs more to fail). I got some seed that I’ll need to start in mid October if I decide to try onions. I had planned on it, but with the way all sorts of things are going right now in the garden and in other areas of life, I may just put in cover crops in most of the beds for winter and call it good. Cover crops are good as a matter of fact. I just have to decide what to do. |
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Post by woodeye on Sept 19, 2022 3:22:16 GMT -6
chrysanthemum , the onion picture was from 2016, it's an old photo, but the fun of growing Candy onions never gets old. I could never use all I grew, but that wasn't a problem because friends and family helped out all they could. I froze countless bags of onions to use in cooking, onions and bell peppers took up a lot of room in the freezer. The plants were expensive in 2016, and the only way to get a price break was to buy a bunch of bunches, so to speak. I planted double rows, they did as well that way as they did single rows and didn't take up so much room. I'd love to be able to just order 1 bunch for next year, but the price scares me away from doing that. I just checked the current price for 1 bunch of onions delivered. $14.50 Yikes. But 30 bunches is $95 delivered. The 30 bunch price is twice what it was 6 years ago. And the fun part, planting them with this planter, the price of it has doubled since I bought it in December, 2014.
standnplant.com/index.php/seeder
All the reasons you listed for a bad onion year make sense, I agree. It would have been tough for a good onion crop here this year. I like to plant during the last week of February and then dig them all on June 15. With all the rain I got here in May and June, I'm afraid that it would have been a major mess.
I may as well post the picture of the biggest Candy onion I ever grew, but I don't know if it's one of the 2 in the photo above, I had several rows of them that were fairly good size...
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Post by Daddio7 on Oct 11, 2022 23:34:48 GMT -6
chrysanthemum , the onion picture was from 2016, it's an old photo, but the fun of growing Candy onions never gets old. I could never use all I grew, but that wasn't a problem because friends and family helped out all they could. I froze countless bags of onions to use in cooking, onions and bell peppers took up a lot of room in the freezer. The plants were expensive in 2016, and the only way to get a price break was to buy a bunch of bunches, so to speak. I planted double rows, they did as well that way as they did single rows and didn't take up so much room. I'd love to be able to just order 1 bunch for next year, but the price scares me away from doing that. I just checked the current price for 1 bunch of onions delivered. $14.50 Yikes. But 30 bunches is $95 delivered. The 30 bunch price is twice what it was 6 years ago. And the fun part, planting them with this planter, the price of it has doubled since I bought it in December, 2014.
standnplant.com/index.php/seeder
All the reasons you listed for a bad onion year make sense, I agree. It would have been tough for a good onion crop here this year. I like to plant during the last week of February and then dig them all on June 15. With all the rain I got here in May and June, I'm afraid that it would have been a major mess.
I may as well post the picture of the biggest Candy onion I ever grew, but I don't know if it's one of the 2 in the photo above, I had several rows of them that were fairly good size...
15 years ago I worked on a farm here in north Florida and we grew 10 acres of sweet onions (the same as Vidalia onions). We planted a seed bed in early Sept. When large enough a crew pulled the seedlings and planted them in a field to grow out. They were harvested in mid April. Just happens I have ordered some Candy onion seed. I will see how I can do in my garden.
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