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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming Digest, Vol 98, Issue 17

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  • From: Mark Weinheimer <mrw601 AT gmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming Digest, Vol 98, Issue 17
  • Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:37:08 -0500


Subject: Re: [Market-farming] multiplier onions - Onions grown from
       bulbs


I hope you don't mind if I slightly hijack this thread, but it reminded me
of something we noticed with our onions last year, and wondered if others
noticed this last year or in past years as well.
Last year we switched to growing our onions predominately from bulbs.  I've
always used a fair amount of bulbs for my yellow cooking onions. (Sturon
from Veseys seems to work good for us)  Last year I was able to get some red
and white bulbs as well.  We're in a short season area, and bulbs are
usually more reliable, depending on the weather to have good sized onions in
the fall.
Of course, since we switched to mostly bulbs, we ended up with a hot dry
summer for a change.  What surprised me though, was that the red and white
onoins did terrible in the heat!  More than 75% of them went to seed and had
unsaleable bulbs.  We had a very limited # of red and white plants grown
from seed, and those plants did not bolt to seed and done reasonably well.
Of our yellow Sturon bulbs, we did see more than usual #'s of those going to
seed as well, but it was under 10%, and we still had a decent crop of those.
So I did see this much more so in the red and white bulbs, than in the
yellow onoins.
Has anyone else seen this sort of discrepancy between using bulbs or plants,
depending on the weather for a particular season?  (Right or wrong, I
switched back to plants for everything this year except our usual amount of
the Sturon bulbs,  and intend to put most of the onion plants on plastic
mulch.)

Dave


Dave,
I only grow early green onions from sets or bulbs.  We're in a short growing season area, too, but I get much better onions from plants.  We never get bolting on the onions, although in the frigid summer of 2009 we did have a lot of leeks that bolted.  By the way, when I asked Dixondale about the problem the following spring, they sent me a free box of leeks.
Best of luck,
Mark
--
Mark Weinheimer
Farm Manager
Regional Food Bank of NENY
965 Albany-Shaker Road
Latham, NY  12110
(518) 339-5726
(518) 786-3691
(518) 786-3004 Fax
www.regionalfoodbank.net


  • Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming Digest, Vol 98, Issue 17, Mark Weinheimer, 03/10/2011

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