Hey Peter, I am no expert on onions by any stretch!! But, my grandfather was! When I was a kid, he grew some of the biggest and sweetest yellow spanish onions that I had ever eaten. I remember several times when he was asked what he did to grow such onions. His reply was simple... "Chicken manure... plenty of chicken manure!" I don't know if you have access to such, but he (and I now follow his lead) would collect chicken manure from the hen house and "sprinkle" it directly on and between the onions. He said that an onion could stand up to all the chicken manure that you could put on it. I don't how true that particular statement is. But I do know that by the end of the growing season, the chicken manure is usally about 1.5 - 2 inches deep around my onions and they do very, very well. Good luck to ya! By the way, check out this link to a page from Iowa state about harvesting and storing onions: Here is a link that might be useful: Harvesting and Storing Onions

Garlic and shallots here in Virginia are usually planted for me in the mid October to mid November timeframe, though I usually shoot for the beginning of that time because I want to get them growing some before I mulch them for winter. Certainly for garlic you break apart the heads of garlic into cloves and plant them - you can find more details easily online. For shallots and potato onions( somewhat related to shallots), it is individual bulbs that you plant. If you plant a large shallot bulb, then at harvest (probably sometime in June for here in Virginia) then at harvest you could have six or more, even up to 12 or 15 individual new bulbs. Something I didn't understand so well at first is that these new bulbs are usually much smaller than the originally planted bulb. So what you do is replant all those smaller bulbs the next fall, and they develop into nice big shallots like you originally planted. Since it is a two year cycle, what I recommend is buying you lot of starting shallots two years in a row so each year you are planting plenty of the large bulbs. Then every year you will have lots of the small ones for seed and large ones for eating. Potato onions work much the same way, though you tend to get more uniformly sized new onions each year. Can't really help you with the seed and traditional onion issues - I'm just not compelled to grow them when I only have the limited garden space of a typical half acre neighborhood lot, though I eat my own garlic year round.

I'd view this as a positive experience and just try to treat the plants for thrips. I wouldn't discard the plants. Any onion plants you buy may be harboring thrips because thrips are found worldwide and have developed a resistance to many of the pesticides used to combat them. Having found the thrips now, before your plants are even out in the garden, maybe you can get control of the thrips now and then have less trouble with them later on. I'd take them outdoors, undo the bundles, spread the onions out and spray them with the organic pesticide of my choice. Spray one side, let it work for a while, then flip over the onions and spray the side that had been lying on the ground. Spinosad and/or neem, whichever you have, likely would be the most effective of the organic options when it comes to thrips. Or, you can use an insecticidal soap spray on the plants, but if you do that, I'd spray them in the shade and then rinse the plants off after a few minutes. One reason you're unlikely to get rid of all of them no matter what you do is that they tunnel into the leaves for a part of their growth cycle and nothing you use that is safe and organic can reach them inside the leaves. Thrips are always with us. I rely on the lady bugs and green lacewings to help control them. While thrips absolutely can cause major problems, generally by spreading diseases, I've never had an onion disease issue in my garden that even required me to think about spraying for thrips. However, a couple of years ago, a major thrip outbreak spead a disease (I think it was asters yellow) that virtually wiped out garlic crops in some northern states. Often, thrips ride in on the wind here, do their damage and move on. I tend to see thrip damage at a certain point, and then rarely see any new damage after that first round. I don't know if that is typical of the way thrips behave because I know they can produce new generation many times over each year, or if it means that the beneficial insects in my garden are just managing to control them well enough after the initial outbreak. You know, Bon, if they are drowing when they hit the water, I'd keep a bowl of water sitting in the same room with the onions for as long as you're holding them indoors. If the thrips aren't drowing in the water, try putting a drop or two of vegetable oil, neem oil, olive oil or any other nontoxic oil you have in that bowl of water to see if they'll get coated in the oil and then drown. You also can use blue sticky traps, but how many of us have blue sticky traps sitting around waiting to be used? (grin) You might try one of those sticky traps meant to catch flies. It might happen to attract and catch thrips. Discarding the current onions and buying a new bunch likely would just bring home a bunch more thrips and, in one sense, it hardly matters. Thrips love onions and will find them pretty much every year even if you have managed to start out with thrip-free onion plants, and I doubt such a thing exists. I see thrip damage (it appears as sort of silvery lines on the onion leaves) on the onion plants at some point every year and just don't worry about it. It's never risen to the level here that I've given it a second thought.

I was thinking the same thing. I actually think they look pretty good. Just because they can be grown in water for a while does not mean they cannot get over saturated when growing in medium. They actually grow different kinds of roots between the two types of culture. Those in the medium need aeration and can definitely drown. Alliums almost all are notorious for needing excellent drainage.