Onions - A Garden Post

So it's that time of year again, time to get out and start planting the garden. Every fall I get so excited about planting my garden in the spring. I love growing things. I grew up always helping my mother in the garden and and though there were times I'm sure I complained about picking beans or digging potatoes....

Actually I doubt I ever complained about digging potatoes cause I still love doing that...its like a treasure hunt. ;)

Anyway I'm sure I didn't love it all the time, but I really do enjoy being out in my garden!

I was asked earlier this winter about doing some post's on my blog about gardening. So I am going to try and do some to help anyone out there who is thinking about starting their own garden.

Two years ago, I did a post about planting potatoes. If you missed it here is a link to it as well as the post I did about Harvesting Potatoes.

Well today I am gonna talk about something else that I always plant that are super easy to grow....      

Onions.

Now there are two ways of buying and planting onions.

1. You can buy bundles of small onion plants like these in the picture. These usually come in bundles of 25....which means 30-60 plants ;) This is the way I usually get my onions and then I end up planting all the plants even though I will never use all of them. Just more to give to my friends.

2. You can buy what are call "onion sets". They usually come in a bag and are just little bulbs with no green tops. I have done these one time and they worked fine, but I like doing the others because after they are in the ground it already looks like something is growing.

Ok lets talk planting.  

First you need a nicely tilled / worked up soil. 

Once that is ready I like to steak a line from one end of the garden to the other.

This Helps to plant everything in a strait line.

Fact: Eventhough I put this line in, I still usually manage to plant crooked and Caleb makes fun of me for it.  

Now what I like to do to make planting go fast is lay all the onions out first. I plant them in two rows that are about 2 inches apart and I stagger the rows.

So in one row I will plant 2 onions that are 2 inches apart and in the other row I will plant an onion that is at about the 1inch mark between. I should have taken a picture of this, but I didn't think about that till now. Also I don't measure every single onion, I just eyeball it. So some might be 3 inches apart and some might be 1 1/2 inches apart. 

Once I have them all laid out I will got to where each one is and stick my finger in the ground and dig a little hole with my finger. 

 

Then I will stick the plant down in the hole...

and pinch up the soil around it.

 And there you have it, you planted an onion. Pretty easy, right ?!?!

Now move on to the rest of the onions and plant as many as you want. 

As far as what to do now, well you just let them grow.  

If you want green onions you can plant them close together and you can cut the tops off the onions and use them, cause they will grow back.  

If you get the onion sets instead of the plants I would probably dig a little trench like I do for potatoes and then just lay them in the bottom and then cover them once I get them all laid out.

I usually wait till the tops completely die till I harvest them all, but if I need an onion while they are growing I will go and grab one.

So there ya have it. That's how you plant onions, they are really easy and kinda fun to grow. I hope some of you give them a try.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

JP