Yellow multipliers have been a family heirloom of some of my late father's relatives for a long time. Mostly all have been spring planted, but I have planted them in the fall, too, with quite similar success. I also have Kelly Winterton's Green Mountain, and they did very well spring planted this past year. I will be planting both the yellow and the whites some in the fall and some in the spring.

The multiplier onions are usually very frost tolerant and can be planted out quite early in the spring, the same as onion sets or when you put out hardened off onion plants. I haven't seen much difference between fall planted and early spring planted myself. They keep superbly; so there is no rush to get the bulbs in the ground out of concern that they will not last until spring. One of my father's cousins skipped a year planting back the yellows and the second spring still got just about a perfect stand.

My mother's advice for planting either onion sets or multipliers is not to plant them deep. She always wanted hers right at the surface. I have my best luck doing that even with the fall garlic. A shallow notch with the dibble and push the clove or the set right into the bottom of it and then water in the bed.

Steve,
Your fall planted onions might have gotten interrupted by a warm spell then went back to cold making them think they were in the second year?

I only really grew yellow multiplier onions for a few years but in my experience they were more prone to bolting when planted in the fall.

Rodney

The two multipliers I grow can be either Fall or Spring planted; they are both winter hardy & long storing. Flower stalks will only appear on the Fall planted stock, and even then the weather seems to influence whether they bloom or not; some years flowering is nearly 100%, sometimes little to none. Spring planted bulbs never flower.

There were a couple years where I planted in both Fall & Spring. The Fall planted had bigger nests, and some of the largest bulbs, including a fair number of doubles. The Spring planted stock had smaller nests, fewer large bulbs, and no doubles. If I wanted to use them for pickling, I would probably prefer the Spring planted, since those formed nice consistent "rounds".

In 2012, I was unable to plant the onions in the Fall, so planned for Spring 2013 instead. Wet weather prevented early planting, so I planted the surviving bulbs in July of that year. They came up, and immediately divided to form large clusters - but never bulbed up. I left them in the ground until Spring 2014. Most of the onions survived the winter, but were drowned by Spring flooding & smothered by weeds. The clusters which survived, though, had numerous small bulbs, which I Fall planted this year.
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Fall planted

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Spring planted

The two cultivars that I grow appear to have their bulb growth triggered by long days, so the earlier in Spring they can begin growth, the larger they will be. The July planting resulted only in large clusters of scallions, so it might be a good technique if late scallions are desired.

Well, never got the onions planted in the Fall. Because we had such a long mild fall the bed I had intended to use was full of cabbage and other kohl crops that I didn't want to pull early. Finally got the Garlic in an alternate location, but never did get the Onions in. They will all be spring planted, as early as I can get out.

I also plant them rather shallow, just deep enough so that you can just see the nose, and then give a good layer of chopped leaves. We'll see what 2015 brings!

Steve

Yellow multipliers will do well enough spring planted. Plant shallow; so that the noses definitely stick out. Kelly's Green Mountain whites do very well spring planted. IIRC that is how he does it himself, and last summer that worked very well for me, too. The nests were small but the individual bulbs were larger in general for the green mountain than for the yellow multipliers. To the best of my knowledge relatives, for whom a strain of yellow multpliers was a family heirloom, always spring planted with never a bolt. Those I fall planted last year had a single half hearted bolt, which I pinched out.

I have not had to take any special care of stored bulbs yet, beyond making sure to get a good cure, right after digging them and then stay dry. I find they can be stored at very close to room temperature in fact, for both the yellows and the Green Mountains.

That would be mid to low 60s at that end of my kitchen- I don't keep it very warm over there toward the back door. BUT I don't do anything special beyond braiding them, and I think those braids would hold very nearly as well just hanging in the kitchen where one could reach from the counter to pick whatever was needed. In fact I have seen that done in kitchens somewhat warmer than mine with no sprouting.

That would be the yellows, but this is the second winter that I have been treating my Green Mountains exactly like the yellows and I do not see any difference this year either.

Mid summer planting for the following year's harvest is intriguing. You get the nest divisions this fall and next spring they hopefully will size up, or maybe you can dig them very early next spring and split them out to individual plants with more room to size up... Anybody else ever tried that. The one time I tried spring divisions, I lost a goodly portion of the resulting divisions, though not all of them. When I tried that under lights with garlic and multipliers, the garlics split out well enough but the multipliers didn't split up nearly as well and were difficult to separate. The resulting divsions did not do so good however, which I suspect had more to do with failure to control the lights properly as anything, daylength probably was more critical than I allowed for.