I have used newspaper, shredded newspaper, shredded office paper, pine shavings, southern cedar shavings, oak chips and spent mushroom dirt. newspaper can blow easily and just doesn't look good. It can also make paper mache. It works though. Lots of independent tests show shredded office paper equal to or superior to the best comercial mulches. It has done very well for me. Spent mushroom dirt raises the ground level, but does little to stop insects or weeds. It is easy to weed though. Wood shavings look the best, stop lots of problems, but they crank the PH down. I add agricultural crushed limestone to buffer the acid and the onions seem to do well. Paper is almost entirely carbon hydrogen and oxygen. Wood shavings and chips provide a more ballanced diet, if you can get past the PH issues. Fresh wood shavings are not generally recomended, but I have used them with reasonable success. http://ojas.ucok.edu/01/papers/bfimple01.htm http://organic.tfrec.wsu.edu/OrganicIFP/OrchardFloorManagement/MulchTalk01Web.PDF

planted onions and garlic on the 15 Oct. last year- fertilized with 5-10-10 - mulched onions and garlic with 6"of leaves directly out of bagger- did two 30' rows of garlic and two 30' rows of stuttgard onions the same way-excellent results this year- left mulch on this growing season- super onions and garlic. same time planted two rows of stuttgarders with leaves and removed most of leaves in the spring- didn't have enough days in the week to keep up with the weeding- couldn't buy any onions this fall to plant- next spring going to plant onions and mulch with straw or wood shavings - don't recommend using to much organic composted chicken manure- it's high in nitrogen- look for composted manure with higher phos. and potash (N-P-K)-goodluck this coming spring- the key is to buy quality sets right in the begining-HAPPY GARDENING!!!

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

Green onions don't usually need as much space as you have given them in the picture. Also, they are great for containers, in case that you need that space for other things. Besides that, what you are seeing is typical of onion transplants. Depending on how many you have planted, if you pick the leaves in batches, then you should have a steady supply of fresh green onion. Eg, pick group A this week. Next week or two, pick group B. and then maybe a group C or D in there if you have that many. That way, by staggering when you pick leaves, the others will continue growing to larger sizes for you before you need them. I have also done it to where I cherry-pick some leaves from a particular onion, leaving the smaller leaves to continue growing and later get harvested.