After only marginal success with my onions last year, I decided to try something different this year. So far, so good.
For those of you following this blog, you know I harvested some free compost this winter. My soil here is extremely heavy clay (more on that in another post), but my onions just would not develop fully in the tight soil. So this season I (okay, honest moment, mainly my protesting son) scraped up some of the better top soil from unused corners of the garden and mixed this 50/50 in a wheel barrow to create a lighter, more organically rich type of soil.
Once this was accomplished I (another honest moment, my daughter, pulled back the soil about 1 foot wide by 75 feet long on the south facing side of my garden. I put this strip on the south so that my corn, okra, beans, and tomatoes would not block the sun from my ground dwellers. This strip is serving as the home to my onions and cucumbers this year.
As the dirt work was being done, I soaked my onions sets in a mixture of 1 tsp of Monty’s 4-15-12 and 1 TBSP Monty’s Liquid Carbon in 16 ounces of water. (I did this for both my white and yellow onions.
Once the soil was pulled back, I (okay, this time it was me) dug one inch deep holes in the earth spaced 1 inch apart in all directions in a grid about 1 foot by one foot. Then I placed my onion sets in the indentations. Once they were in place, I covered them with 3-4 inches of my newly created soil/compost mix. Two weeks later they are up and looking good.
Without having to fight through the hard East Tennesee clay, the onions are emerging early.
For those of you who grow onion regularly, you will know that onions spaced only 1 inch apart will not develop fully as the bulbs will crowd each other. However, my plans are to make my first harvest in about two weeks. This will give us some good, early spring onions, or green onions, and leave those remaining with the space they will need to develop into good sized bulbs.
If you are doing the math, you know that my 2 onions patches must look awfully lonely in a 72 foot row. Indeed, they do. But my plans are to plant similar subsequent patches every three weeks into early/mid June so that I will have a continuous harvest of fresh onions this season.
Keep checking back and I will keep you posted on how this experiment is working, but so far, so good.
