“don’t jump, onion!” by loco’s photos
TheGardenLady received this question from Cat (you can read her blog here).
Recently my onions (the ones I bought to eat) decided to demand “freedom†and grow! So much I had to plant them as I was not able to eat them anymore. Some of them didn’t survive too long but one even has a beautiful flower! But I don’t know if they require any extra care? I live on a six floor so right now they are on a pot (a big one) in the balcony. That should do, right?
When you buy onions- Allium cepa is the common onion, squeeze to see if the bulbs are hard. If any onion is soft when you squeeze it, don’t buy it because it will not last long. It will rot or send up leaves as yours did. I often think that when onions are on sale, that is because they are old onions and they are often soft.
When you bring your onions home, you have to keep them so that they don’t rot or send up leaves. If they are a little soft, you can still use the bulb for cooking. If you want to eat it raw, it is nicer to eat a crisp slice of onion; but it is still edible.
What are onions? They are edible bulbs. There are a few methods of growing onions. One of the easiest ways to grow more onions, is to plant an onion bulb raised from seeds. These are called onion sets which are just small onion bulbs that are too small to eat. You can buy onion sets at stores from catalogs or online. Onions are biennial, so farmers harvest onions the first year if they want to sell them for eating. They harvest onions before they send up flowers. Onions send up flowers to make seeds. If the farmer is in the business of making seeds, he will let his onions go into seed. If you have flowers, you will probably not want to eat the onion any more because the flower stalk comes up through the bulb. So when your onion makes seed, you can start new onions in your container.
When you harvest or buy onions, the onions will try to grow if you have them in a too warm, too humid area- that is they will send up leaves if they don’t rot first. Though you bought your onions to eat, TheGardenLady thinks you have been lucky to see your onion plant start to grow, especially if you live in the city where you may never have seen how it grows. And you also get to see the pretty flower that onions have. When you planted it in soil, you did the right thing for the bulb. Wait to see if your flower produces seeds and plant them when they are dry.
Let TheGardenLady readers know if you have luck growing little onions. Find out how to grow and harvest onions here.
From now on if you want to keep onions to eat, try to keep your onions in a cool, dry spot in your apartment, a cool dry place that has good air circulation. For air circulation onions are often sold in mesh bags. You can buy onion bags or make your own. To store onions with good air circulation after harvesting them, my mother would braid them and hang them. It is such a pretty way to keep onions, TheGardenLady wishes they were sold this way; but I guess it is too expensive to do. If you know a farmer who sells onions, perhaps you can buy them with the leaves and braid them yourself. (see here)
If the spot you keep your onions in is cool and dry, onions can last up to 9 months, depending on the type of onion, before they rot or start growing. Onions and potatoes should not be stored together. For some reason when stored together both onions and potatoes tend to rot faster.
If you don’t have a cool, dry area for storage, you can also store some onions in the refrigerator for a shorter time. Or you can peel them, slice them and freeze the onion slices. They say that refrigerated or frozen onions won’t make you tear when you cut or chop them.