They are beautiful, digit! I keep telling myself I have to try growing them. Do you save seed or buy fresh and may I ask where you order them from?

Barb,

I saved some shallot seed but not onion ... okay, the ornamental onion re-seeds like crazy in my front yard every year!

Onion seed is nearly always from Osborne Seed in My. Vernon, Washington.

They have a good selection. (altho I need to pay attention to "westside" information in the descriptions. This ain't westside of the Cascades country!)

Steve

I grew Candy and it's red counterpart this year. The red ones bulbed super early for me and weren't very big. Candy did pretty good though, nice size on most of them and no bolting which was nice. I have always been a bit bamboozled that onions are touted as cool weather crops bit it seems to be that even a slight hint of frost will cause them to bolt rather than bulb.

The Walla Walla Sweet:

They are all flat on the ground. There are nice big ones, a few. This wasn't a stellar year for the Walla Walla. Too many little guys - of course, that is mostly my fault for crowding them. Still, I don't think they cared much for the weather.

The SV405:

Only 2 onions out of many are mature. I was beginning to wonder how long it would take ... Some nice, big white onions, New to me from Osborne. (Wish they would come up with an appealing name, rolling eyes.) Maybe they will make good keepers. I evidently have good basement conditions for onion storage. The sweet onions last longer than they are supposed to. Still, growing a ton of them and not making it to chive harvest in the spring. Sad.

ᐛ Steve!

Here are the Red Devils. A very unfortunate choice for a name! They are dropping over even as we speak ...

For some reason, I'm not too excited about red onions. And, it is only partly because they try to live up to their name! No, it's just that I have not found one as sweet and nice as most any of the white and yellow that I have grown.

Steve

I tried onion sets last year and had no luck with them at all - first attempt, I obviously didn't know what I was doing - so I didn't make room for onions in my garden this year. But I do love onions - the queen of the garden, as I read somewhere years ago - and would love to make salsa using the ingredients from my own veggie garden, so I will try them again.

I did try growing leeks for the first time this year - too early to tell if I was successful, but even if I am not, I am definitely going to try these again. I didn't really prepare a proper bed for them so the results are going to be a bit iffy, I think; next year I will do it right ( I hope.)

Holly

I'm not sure to what to attribute my success with onions. It isn't a special knowledge. For example, I just learned about "water mold," a common and sometimes serious onion disease. It's why even large onion farms are using drip irrigation rather than overhead sprinklers. I use the sprinklers and have some problem with water mold every year. It doesn't damage them all that much.

I was briefly reading about planting by the moon the other day. They put onions in the root crop category. Onion bulbs aren't roots. They are the base of the leaves. Onions have plenty of stringy roots. Fertilize them more like corn or lawn grass. Those leaves need to grow to produce good bulbs.

Leeks and bunching onions don't form bulbs but need that high N fertilizer, too. My leeks struggle through the summer heat. I will get some fish emulsion on them soon so that they can take advantage of the cooler days ahead to make some growth. All these weeks since they sprouted indoors back about the first week of February. They won't gain baseball bat size in this climate but they really should after all this time. Nothing like leek and potato soup so I'm happy to have them in the garden.

Steve

And, I'm having leek and potato soup!

Here is what the SV405 looked like at the end of September, the few that had begun to go down:

Here are some of them with some of the largest Walla Walla's. The SV did grow a lot through their many months.

Steve

I grew Walla Walla for the first time this year. They didn't get as big as expected probably due to their partial shade area but they are great tasting. Still have a couple dozen in the ground.

Odd thing ...

Utah grows larger than Walla Walla in my garden. I suppose that the names don't mean much ... and, the 200+/- miles to Walla Walla is a ways.

Watch for mold on those onion tops, out there in your garden.

Steve