It might happen if the wild onions have already flowered and set seed. Otherwise, no, it shouldn't be a problem. We have wild onions in some of our pastures and when I mow them in spring, I add those clippings (before the onions flower) to my garden mulch and I don't have a problem with wild onions popping up in the garden.

Carol, On the day you were down here for the funeral, I kind of pictured you in my mind racing back home to get there before the ice storm arrived. I was relieved we had rain in the forecast because the day you were at the funeral we had multiple fires in our county. I am hoping the inch of rain we got will keep it quiet for a little while. I hope Al has a safe trip home whenever the roads are clear enough for him to drive back. I have had my onions for 10 days and haven't planted them yet. Onions can freeze (not that they necessarily will) at 20 degrees and our forecast for last night and tonight was 24 degrees as of yesterday evening. At our house we only went down to 25 degrees this morning but Burneyville went down to 23. I might plant onions tomorrow if there's no temps lower than 25 in our 7-day forecast. Since our overnight low tends to go lower than forecast fairly often, I always try to err on the side of safety when planting onions. Last year it was really warm here so I planted early. This year the nights have been much colder so I am planting late. For anybody wondering, you normally can hold fresh, Dixondale onions for 3 weeks before planting. Because they are pulled and bundled immediately before being shipped to you, they are really fresh and green and tolerate 3 weeks out of the ground before planting just fine. Pam, I use the mesh tubes that Carol calls onion socks. I just call them mesh onion tubes. Before I started using the mesh tubes I did use old stockings, tying a knot between each onion. With the mesh tubes, I use a twist tie or a zip tie (whatever I have handy) instead of tying a knot. That way I can reuse the mesh tubes. You also can get more onions in a tube if you aren't using up some of the tube to tie a knot in the tube itself. I know people, like Chandra, who put more than one onion in the tube before tying it off. I also know people who store their onions in mesh bags or in burlap potato sacks. In a dry year, all the methods seem to work equally well as long as the onions were well-cured before being stored. In a really, really wet year like 2007 (hard to describe how wet it was, but I remember we had a foot of rain in June alone....which is really close to onion harvest time in my part of the state), the mesh tubes worked the best. All the onions grown here that year were huge and had the highest water content I've ever seen in onions. It was essential that year to tie off the tube in between each and every onion because in any place where two onions were allowed to touch each other, rot set in. I cured mine twice as long as usual before moving them to storage. I ordered 7 bundles of onions this year because I wanted to try the two new short day varieties. It has been a few years since I planted 7 bundles in one year. The last time I grew that many, I froze a lot of the excess ones for cooking that I felt were likely to go bad before we could eat them all. Those frozen onions lasted us 3 years. The fresh ones, harvested in June or July, lasted us until February or March, which is really good considering how wet they were at harvest. I use a ton of onions in cooking and canning. My favorite is Candy too, but I like Texas 1015Y just about as well, and I always grow one full bundle of red onions for Habanero Gold jelly-making. Most of the puddles from the Wed-Thurs rain have begun to disappear as the moisture soaks into the ground, but my garden still is a lake. If I plant onions in the next couple of days, I'm going to be planting in the mud. Dawn

The bulbs need air and sunlight. Mulching next to the plant is not recommended. In most cases onions do not handle mulching very well, onions like to have their tops exposed to the air. Mulching also increases the risk of the bulbs rotting.

Shaer, If you go to the Dixondale Farms website page I've linked at the bottom of the page, you can read about their trench method of fertilizing. I usually work fertilizer into the soil before planting because I want it down deeper in the bed below the root zone of the early plants, but I also use their trench method some years. The trench method can be used with any form of organic fertilizer or synthetic fertilizer. I like Dixondale's own fertilizer for use at planting time, although I don't buy it every year. I usually buy it and use it every other year. In the in-between years, I add lots and lots of organic matter in the fall and winter before planting onions in either February or March. I have clay soil that is mineral-rich, so mostly all I have to worry about is adding organic matter to improve its tilth and texture. With any kind of manure, even if it has been composted and even if it is from animals that people swear have never been fed any sort of feed that could be contaminated with herbicide residue, you still need to do a bio-assay test for herbicide residue. There is a specific type of herbicide commonly used on hay fields, pastures, and in city parks and golf courses that can persist even in the manure of animals long after they've eaten food raised with that herbicide sprayed on it. If it contaminates your garden seed, it can kill your crops and make your soil virtually unusable (except for corn and other monocots) for 1 to 4 or 5 years. Google "killer compost" or "herbicide carryover in manure or compost" to read about this long-term, ongoing issue that has been a problem throughout the 2000s if it is new to you. A couple of years ago, purchased, bagged compost killed gardens in a particular area, and the herbicide residue eventually was tracked back to name-brand horse feed that your or I or anyone else could walk in to a feed store and buy today. That's why we need to test all manure before we add it to our gardens----there is no guarantee that our animal feed wasn't contaminated with herbicide residue. A neighbor of ours inadvertently ruined her own garden a few years back by using manure from her animals and/or purchased hay as mulch. I don't believe she uses those herbicides on her place, but it was during drought years when ranchers were scrambling to buy hay from somebody....anybody.....in order to have something for their horses and cows to eat. I think that during that time, those herbicide residues were brought onto her place in purchased hay and then came into her garden either via hay mulch or animal manure. Rather than waiting for a unknown number of years for the soil to clear up, she decided to build a new garden in a new area----a workable option for folks on rural acreage who have lots of space, but not for someone on a standard city lot. You also can make manure or compost tea and feed it to the plants. That is another way to use clean, herbicide-free manure in a manner that won't burn plant roots. You dilute the manure tea after you make it until its color is the color of weak, watered-down iced tea. There are a couple of plants that are such heavy feeders that it can be hard to keep them happy---onions are sort of that way. They will devour any and all nitrogen you give them, and that's a good thing because lots of nitrogen makes lots of onions. With onions, the more nitrogen, the merrier. The number of leaves each onion plant has and the size of the leaves is what determines how big or small (along with rainfall) your onions will be. For big, softball-sized onions, your plants need regular access to plenty of nitrogen and roughly 21" of rainfall/irrigation during the plants' lives. With most plants, we urge folks not to overfeed nitrogen, but with onions, if you want big onions, shoot for producing big leaves and plenty of them. Each leaf gives you a layer or ring of onion flesh. Big leaves give you big thick rings or layers, small leaves give you smaller rings or layers. Early in their lives, I like the fertilizers that have more of a 1-2-1 ratio (like Dixondale's) to get the onions off to a good start. Then, a few weeks later, I like to give them some extra nitrogen to help the leaves make great growth. Having said that, sometimes I don't feed them at all and let them make all their growth merely of what is in my soil, but I do enrich the soil with copious amounts of compost every year. I often use Espoma's organic fertilizers, though I find myself not as happy as before with some that have been reformulated in recent years. Hope this helps, and feel free to ask more questions. Dawn Dixondale Farms' Onion Fertilizer Trench Technique