I have been pulling a few of my onions and garlic. I think they would have been much better if I had known what I was doing and had given them more fert. and water. The onions and garlic are larger than they were last year due to what little I have learned.

We have been digging a few potatoes also but they are not much to take either. All have taste great.

Our onions are also now in 2-3" bulbs but they still pretty nice and lush green. I will wait for few more days. Although we have been spot-picking green onions to make room for succession planting and already planted cucumbers and eggplants in those spots. -Chandra

My onions are nowhere near being ready. The bulbs are still enlarging, and the foliage remains green, lush and strong. Some of the onions are about softball-sized, but most are between baseball and tennis ball sized.Only one short-day onion has foliage that is lying down on the ground, but I think yesterday's 30 mph winds did that because that onion was standing straight and tall yesterday morning with no softening of the neck whatsoever.

For anyone who's new to growing onions, if you are wondering how to know when they are ready, it is when their necks soften and all the green foliage turns yellowish or brownish and falls over prostrate on the ground. Once that happens, you can pick them and cure them for a few days before storing them away.

I am eager to get the succession crops in the ground in the bed currently full of onions, but I know that I just have to be patient and wait for the necks to soften and fall over. I think that is still a couple of weeks away. I will not pick the onions prematurely since that causes them to last for a shorter period of time in storage.

The intermediate day types that survived the flooding March rains in the garden and the bolting that took out so many of them are not as big as the short day types and likely will not match them in size or quality. As the intermediate ones continue to bolt at the rate of one or two a week, I use them. More than half of the intermediate day ones have bolted already, but the rest are growing well.

Despite the erratic weather, the onions have performed really well overall and it is a great onion year here.

It is really dry here and I have not installed my irrigation tubes. I had thought of trying to go with mulch and a little hand watering every now and then, but it is not going to work. I have not tried to keep records but I think it is dryer now than it was this time last year. I just finished driving 2 "T" post in the garden to make a tomato trellis. The ground was very hard. This area is next to the onions, no wonder they don't look happy.

Larry

Mine are bulbing nicely but are still green for the most part. I realized that I don't know what a bolting onion looks like, because I picked one of the small ones the other day for dinner and found a stalk full of seeds when I was chopping it. I was expecting a flower or something to grow out of the onion, but I guess that's not how it works?

When the onions are bolting, they send up a tall, stiff stalk and at first it looks a little like it is wearing a tall pointed hat, then they flower. You can eat the onion at that point, but you can't store it, because deterioration has already begun.

Each leaf of the onion makes a layer on the onion itself, so the more leaves you get, the bigger onions you get. Dixondale says 13 is good, but I have never had 13. As the onion reaches maturity, it will fall over and the neck will fall over and begin to dry out. It will probably still be growing, but all of the growth is going into the onion at that point and not into the leaves. When the onion is mature, the leaves will be dead, and the stalk will be dry. Sometimes something happens and they fall over too soon, but if they are still green, I just leave them there and let them do what they can.

I had seven onions bolt this year and they all did it at the same time. It's a long story, but I planted several different kinds this year and one type in particular were very large when I put them in the ground. Although I didn't mark them in anyway, I do remember that they were near the middle of the in-ground bed and that is where all of the onions were that bolted. I assume that they were just too large at planting time.

Dawn, my onions are not nearly ready to harvest either.

Mia, Sorry, I forgot to say that you can use the ones with scapes. You also can use the scapes. I like them in vases too, and often I plant extra onions under the pecan tree with all the four o'clocks so that they'll give me flowers the next year.

Heather, You must have caught it right when the flower stalk had formed inside the bulb but before it had emerged. If you'd left that onion in the ground a few more days, the stalk would have popped up (seemingly out of nowhere) and then would have bloomed in a ball shape with a multitude of tiny white flowers. When mine are starting to bolt, I usually see the stalk with the tall pointy hat that Carol described one day, and then the flower opens a day or two later if I haven't already pulled the onion by then. When you see the stalk with the pointy hat, it is time to harvest and use that onion.

Carol, Last year I had as many as 13 to 15 leaves on some and those onions were very large. This year, I don't think any onion has more than 11 leaves, but the onions are getting huge as well. The size of the leaves matter too. The bigger the leaf, the bigger the layer of onion flesh. That's why high nitrogen gives you such big onions---the nitrogen feeds the leaves and the leaves convert to carbs I think to feed the onion as it bulbs up, so to speak.`

More of my onions are down today, but I am convinced the wind gusting in the 30s did it because even though they are broken, the neck did not soften...it snapped.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Image of An Onion Flower

I guess I did catch it right it when it started to bolt then, because the stalk with the seeds looked exactly like the other leaves. No top hat, no flower, nothing. I'll have to watch the others closely now to see if others have begun to bolt, too.