Melanie -- It is not uncommon to trim onions just after they are out of seedling stage. Just a light trim off the tip encourages a stronger root and thicker leaf bundle. I usually do mine in the seed flat then once again before transplanting to the ground. As you've already shifted yours once, give them a few days to recover then just a light haircut. (The leaves initiate at the base, so the tip trim doesn't stop growth.) To a point, onions are pretty forgiving and tolerate a couple trims. If you notice bundles of transplants in stores, you'll usually see chopped off tips. The onion guide addresses planting started plants, so not about starting your own from seed. The term bunching is often used a couple ways. One is the true bunching or non-bulbing onion which does not produce a bulb. These stay slender throughout the season. The other is growing the bulbing onions close together and harvesting before the bulbs start to expand very much. Even if planting sets or bulbing transplants, you can have both. Make close spacings then harvest the middle ones at green or bunching size 'til you have your final spacing for bulbing. If you want all green onions, then just leave them close and harvest early.

Here is my 2 cents and I hope it helps. I live in central Florida and I buy a short day variety called 1015 sweet and yellow grainex (Vidalia). I purchase my plants from a place called Dixondalefarms.com out of Texas they are a 5th generation onion farm. I prepare my beds with a lot of compost, bone meal, azomite powder, granular lime and an all purpose organic fertilizer made by espoma(mix in soil well). I then plant my onions in mid November spaced accordingly. I start fertilizing them about a month after planting with the organic espoma all purpose fertilizer and a high nitrogen fertilizer (21-0-0) about every 3 weeks. You can purchase these fertilizers at Ace Hardware except for the azomite powder which you can purchase on amazon. I will water every other day unless you get rain then just play it by ear just don't make your soil soggy you just want it to be moist. I fined it takes about 180 days until harvest but it could be a little sooner depending on how much sun your gardening area gets. I'll typically stop fertilizing my plants about 120 days in another words around the 4 month mark also make sure when you fertilize that it is going to rain or you water your fertilizer in well. This seems to work well for me every year I'll usually harvest softball to baseball size onions and they have a great flavor. I have taken the time to write this because I use to grow small onions. I was planting the wrong variety and planting at the wrong time of the year. So I did a lot of research and talking to other gardeners. I hope this helps and happy gardening! You can also buy your fertilizers through Dixon Dale Farms I just tend to prefer the more organic approach that is why I like the espoma.

Amanda, Well, only you can decide that. I wouldn't plant them, but that is based on trying onions from sets a couple of decades ago and not being happy with their growth or performance. Your results could be entirely different. Since they are not labeled with the variety name, I suspect they are "hot" or "storage" onions merely because that is the type most often sold as sets, and I feel like a company would be more likely to label sweet onion sets if that's what they were simply because of their uniqueness. If you have the space to plant a row of them, then why not plant them and see what you get? Otherwise, you'll never know whether or not they'll grow for you. After all, onions sets could have improved in the 20 or so years since I tried them. : ) Then, in order to "guarantee" you get onions, plant some from transplants. The stores still should have plenty. You'll find them in little bundles, often in boxes or crates made of very thin wood, at garden centers, feed stores, the lawn and garden centers at big box stores, etc. If you like sweet onions, plant something like Texas 1015Y (aka Texas Supersweet), Candy, Super Star, Contessa or Bonnie's White or Yellow Granex. Almost any white or yellow onion sold in bundles of tiny plants in Oklahoma ought to be sweet onions because that is what grows best here. Dawn

You won't find them in stores for fall for differing reasons that relate to how they grow. With the potatoes, because of the timing of the planting, growth and harvesting of the spring/summer crop, potatoes from that crop cannot be used for fall planting because they would have to undergo a lengthy dormancy of several months. The length of the dormancy is longer than the time frame between our spring/early summer harvesting and our fall potato planting time. Without that dormancy, they won't sprout. Thus, commercial growers cannot produce seed potatoes at the timing needed for fall planting in our zone. This also explains why, when you miss some small potatoes while digging, they generally don't sprout in the same year, but do sprout the next winter/early spring as the soil warms up. By then, their dormancy needs have been met. You have a couple of options, only one of which is viable for this year. 1) Purchase regular grocery store potatoes and plant them. Your best chances of success with this method would involve purchasing organic potatoes. The reason why is that conventionally-grown potatoes usually are sprayed with a chemical that inhibits sprouting. Although it eventually wears off and the potatoes do eventually sprout, it can take a really long time for the anti-sprouting sprays to wear off. Organic potatoes are not sprayed with these chemicals so sprout more quickly. When I do this, I like to buy the potatoes 2 or 3 months before I intend to plant them and put them in the back, darkest corner of the walk-in pantry so they can sit there and eventually sprout, hopefully by the time I want to plant them. 2) Buy your fall seed potatoes in late spring while they're still in the stores. Usually I see seed potatoes in the stores through at least May, even though I bought and planted my seed potatoes in February or March. If you buy them in May, and store them in a cool, dry location, they should survive long enough for you to plant them for fall. 3) Order online from retailers who ship them. A few of the online retailers ship as late as June, although you'd need to order them earlier than that (so all the good ones aren't sold out). Onions are a whole different story. Almost all the bulbing types we grow are daylength-sensitive, with the number of hours of sunlight in the day being the factor that triggers them to bulb up. We plant them while the daylength is relatively short in winter, and the lengthening day-length from May through July triggers them to bulb up. In the fall, our weather is all wrong for bulbing onions because, if you could find them, you'd plant them in the longer daylength of summer and they'd be exposed to decreasing daylength as the days went on. The most likely result, depending on when you planted them, would be that the summer daylength would trigger them to try to bulb up very early in their lives when they didn't have enough stored energy in their leaves to produce a bulb. Or, you'd get perpetual leaf growth that never would bulb up. The biggest onion plant producing farm in the USA, Dixondale Farms, doesn't even try to ship onions for fall planting in our zone. I believe they usually start shipping in October or maybe early November, which is great for people in warmer zones than ours, but doesn't work for us. For fall onions, you can plant bunching onions and use them as scallions. These can be easily grown from seed and you can harvest them anytime you want. They won't give you big bulbs, but they produce tons of small ones. Fall also is the time to plant perennial onions, shallots and garlic. There are some daylength-neutral onion varieties that do not rely on daylength to trigger bulbing, but you still won't find them sold in bundles of plants at this time of year like we see in the spring. You could raise them from seed, but I don't think they'd have enough time in summer/autumn to produce a big bulb like we get in spring/summer. Remember that in autumn, the daylength is constantly decreasing and so are the soil temperatures and air temperatures, so it takes fall crops longer to mature than in the spring and summer. The intensity of the sunlight also is lower, so that makes them grow even more slowly. However, you might get onions that were large enough to be worth the time you spent growing them.