Few vegetables are of greater important than the onion. Onions are a hardy biennial which is native to western Asia.The botanial name is allium Cepa:which it belongs to the Lily family, Liliaceae. What are onion sets? They are raised from seeds sown in the summer of the previous year;under good cultivation they will yield fair sized bulbs by the end of the season. Growing onion sets are very simple to do and very easily. First of all what you need to do is go to you favorite garden center that sells onion sets which comes in yellow,red or white. Now when you get them home you need to get some clean plastic containers and a bag of potting soil. I usually use containers that are called six packs which haves six
separate compartments that you fill with the potting soil and after you do this. You can take a onion set and stick it
into the soil. you need to cover the onion set completely with the soil. Now after you plant all 8 containers in the flat you are ready to mist the flat with water. If you don't want to do a full flat of onions you can plant one container and grow the onions the same way. You don't need to have a full flat of onions you can grow as many onions that you wish. Soak the flat but don't drown the onion sets just keep them evenly moist. And if you have a greenhouse you can place the flat on the greenhouse bench if not. You can place them in your house under a grow light. It will take about one month for the onions to grow and be ready to eat as green onions. Or you can either plant them outside or transplant into a larger container and let the onions bulbs get larger. How to make your onion bulbs larger is to do this when the plants get 6 to 8 inches tall you can trim each plant back to half their size to 4 to 3 inches.
You can do this twice doing the growing season to maker bigger bulbs.Also don't let your onions go to seed which I mean bloom. What you want is to cut the tops off twice a growing season to make bigger bulbs. This is for onions that you would like to have larger for in the fall when you would pull them for storage. Which you would use in the winter months. Now if you want to have a continues flow of green onions doing the growing season you can plant a few of them every two weeks. Growing onions and other vegetables in containers can be very rewarding because you have a fresh supply of produce during the growing season. Also people that live in the inner city and don't have room to plant a regular garden can plant in containers and have great success with doing what I told them to do in the above article. I hope you try this and let me know how you do.
Happy Gardening
Gardener Den
No comments:
Post a Comment