carrots or beets are fine.

bush sweet potatoes or regular if you grow up a stake.

Is it too late to plant herbs? Do they require much space?

Oh and some herbs are perennials (oregano, sage, chives to name a few), so if you want to use that area for something different next year I would consider the type of herb carefully or yank them out at the end of the season.

Thank you GG, thats good information about perennials

With herbs, not only are most perennial, they do require room to grow. Chives are pretty small, but many common others like oregano, thyme, sage, etc are really small shrubs and do need space if you plan to let them grow as perennials. Basil is annual, and prime time for seeding, but it needs about 1sqft space per plant, as they can get 3-4' tall when happy.

What space do you have, and what herbs would you prefer? Many grow them as annuals (and some such as rosemary would be in your zone), though it seems a waste to me.

You can plant carrots, I did yesterday, but you won't get them as sweet. They need to be subjected to cold before pulling to be sweet. Same with parsnips. I just planted onions not that long ago and they are doing well. It was from bulbs, not seed. Chives will really spread so keep that in mind.

Little monkeys, you're a bit cooler (zone) than me. Do you imagine I can still plant onions if I use bulbs?

Thanks

I looked it up for your zone and it says through to third week of June. Says carrots are June and July.

That's great news. Thank you. It's my first garden. Where did you find this information? Would you please share the site

I just searched it on google. Not sure how reliable this one is, there's probably one affiliated with a University, I just grabbed the first one I found. I do find their frost dates differ from mine, but may be due to the fact that I am really on the cusp of 4b. Their 5 sounds more like 5b. I had to do 4 for mine to get what is normally my frost dates. Here's the link for you. Good luck with your first garden. :)

http://veggieharvest.com/calendars/zone-6.html

You can get green onions if you plant sets. But it's well past when they should be planted for regular bulb onions. For that they are planted prior to the last frost date.

Rodney

I know I'm in zone 6 but how can I know if I'm A or B?

I'm not sure if they do A and B in US, it might be just a Canadian thing, but you can look up a plant hardiness zone map and find your location.

You can begin planting onions before last frost, you don't have to stop planting them by last frost.

Zone is a pretty poor guide to go by for planting. Zone is your coldest extreme winter temperatures.. pretty useless info except for things that overwinter. First and last frost dates are a better rough guide, but a lot is your climate as well. For onions your latitude also matters.

It is too late to plant onions and get decent size bulbs. The plants will not have enough time to get large enough before bulbing is triggered by the long days (which is already almost starting now.) Onions have a very long growing season, especially from seed. Of course, you can grow scallions now.

You can grow almost anything else... I suggest carrots if you'd like a root crop. Even early potato varieties could work.

My garden is built above ground and has roughly 10 inches (maybe a little less) of soil depth. Is that enough depth for potatoes?

Peter- I found this on Burpee "Setting out onion plants that are too large, planting too early or using the
wrong varieties usually causes onions to bolt or form undersize bulbs."

When I was taught about onions it was that they are a heavy feeder and need nitrogen rich soil, lots of compost. If they don't have that the bulbs don't grow very big.

I'm not trying to be contrary to Peter, just a personal preference but I'd rather take onion (even if the light did effect bulb size) over carrots which will be slightly bitter. Ever have those store carrots that are "yuck"? Well if you want those tasty super sweet carrots they need to have a frost or overwintered. That means you need to wait until later in the season to plant them.

As far as zones, that website I linked does include the frost dates, it's not just temperature ranges.

No to the potatoes. You will not get a good crop. You have to hill potatoes too as they foliage starts to come above ground to keep it from flowering. If you had a near empty box that you could keep adding soil then you might end up with an decent amount if you had the space width wise as well.

Ok, I found more info on what Peter was mentioning about day length and it seems this is only some varieties of onions. I had never heard of this before so thank you Peter for sending me on the track to find out more about it.

Onions that need only 11-13 hours of daylight are called short day onions. I found this on the Oregon State University website. "Short-day onions include: Yellow Bermuda, White Creole and Eclipse onions (12 hours daylight to begin bulb formation). California Early Red, Ebenezer, Early Strasburg (13 hours)."

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/onion-bulb-formation-strongly-linked-day-length

All new to me onions and probably why I've never seen those onions where I live because our growing season is so short.

Here's where other types stand according to the website.

Long day onions include: Yellow Globe Danvers (14 1/4 hours) Sweet Spanish, Yellow Flat Grant (14.9 hours) and Yellow Rynsburg, Zittan Yellow (16 hours).

Intermediate-day onions include: Early Yellow Globe, Australian Brown, White Portugal and Southport Yellow Globe (13.5 hours) Red Wethersfield, Southport Red Globe, Italian Red and Flat Madiera (14 hours).

As Rodney and Peter said it is much too late in zone 6 to plant any type of onion and expect to get bulbs, but you can plants sets and get green onions in a couple months. 10" would probably be enough for Potatoes if you dig a trench about 8" deep and plant the seed potatoes about 10" apart, cover with 2" of soil and then gradually add more soil on top as they grow (hilling). But it is a couple months late in zone 6 for starting potatoes as the tubers don't do well when forming in hot weather.

LoneJack, there are 16 hour varieties of onions so m_gold could still do onions if desired. Your choices are very limited but there are still options.

Last year I grew some potatoes in a large planter and they did better than the ones in the garden because of blight hitting all my tomato and potatoes that were in the garden. I also had much better soil in the pots. I did similar to what Lone Jack suggested. I don't think I did 2" of soil, but enough that it was fully covered. I'd just check them every day on the way to the barn and top up the soil if anything was coming through. When you plant late you get the smaller "new potatoes". You don't get near as many as you could though. The pot method is nice because you can dump the pot out and not have to dig for the potatoes. I have tried the wire cage method at a previous house and didn't have much success with that, but I think that was me and I don't think I watered like I should have.

No it is still too late to get bulbs from long day onions. Assuming you are far enough North, the longest day of the year is less than a month away. If the onions don't have enough time after planting to grow big vegetative growth before bulbing is triggered, they will not have enough greenery to grow a bulb. Or bulbing may not be triggered at all if you plant onions now. They also have shallow roots and will not adjust well to the garden being planted in summer. If you plant sets they will probably bolt too, planted in the summer. Onions are a bad idea, unless you want scallions.

I couldn't understand why I've had luck with planting onion at the end of May and I didn't think there would be that much difference between our zones, but I found out the reason why.

"...the US zones are based entirely on average minimum temperature, and the zones are not subdivided. The Canadian index is far more complicated, and is based on a complicated mathematical formula that takes into account snowfall, wind, rainfall, the warmest month, etc."

From a different site

"The hardiness zones are informative: the extremes of winter cold are a major determinant of whether a plant species can be cultivated outdoors at a particular location; however, the USDA hardiness zones have a number of drawbacks if used without supplementary information.

The zones do not incorporate summer heat levels into the zone determination; thus sites which may have the same mean winter minima, but markedly different summer temperatures, will be accorded the same hardiness zone."

Of course I am also in a slightly cooler zone so I am sure that is the biggest factor now after hearing you say it's way to late. The ground is still frozen in April here half the time. We just had 0c temps on Friday, last year had snow on Mother's day and killing frost on Sept 1st, year before frost at the beginning of June. The old couple I buy my hay from said they never do seeds and almost plant in June because they've had frost in middle of June here. Luckily I haven't seen that yet, and hope I never do. I was devastated enough to go from middle of October frost dates for a 5b zone to early September for 5a. It was a shocker that first gardening season for sure. We do also have a bit of a micro climate here with a almost 50 foot elevation level between the upper and lower garden so that could be part of the reason since this is the first year I've had onions in the upper garden we'll see how they'll do. So far the sets have grown 8 inches in about 2 weeks with three frosts in that time.

With all that jibber jabber said, I'd still much rather prefer a pearl onion to bitter carrots. Only reason I put some seeds in now was for the livestock. I guess it's a preference thing though.

I grew carrots in the summer last year and they tasted great.

USDA zone is really totally irrelevant info for the vast majority of vegetable gardening.