Growing onions: is it better to sow seeds or plant bulbs?
The onion (Allium cepa) is easy to grow. There are several options for planting it in the garden: from bulbils or from seedlings (seeds). Let's see what these two techniques consist of and which one is best for you.
Sowing onion seeds in the garden
Growing onions from seed offers the great advantage of a wide choice of cultivars or varieties. The downside is that it can take up to four months for your crop to mature. Gardeners who live in areas with cold winters will need to start their onion seedlings indoors before transplanting outdoors.
Always check a variety's light requirements or recommended latitudes before purchasing.
When to plant onions in the garden?
Onions like cool weather when they first grow, so they should be planted from February to April, frost-free, except in mild winter regions, where onions can be planted as early as the fall. As a general rule, onions produce tops in cool weather and form bulbs when the weather warms up.
If you are planting indoors
Sow onion seeds four to six weeks before the last average frost - or even earlier indoors or in a cold frame. When indoor seedlings are a few inches tall, harden them off by exposing them to nighttime temperatures above freezing.
If sowing outdoors
Outdoors, sow the seeds in thick rows about 1.5 cm deep. You can try mixing in radish seeds both to mark the planted rows and as traps to attract root maggots away from the onions. More tips for planting onions in the gardenin this video.
Planting Onion Bulbils in the Garden
Bulbils are immature bulbs grown the previous year and offer the most limited choice of cultivars. Their advantages: they are the easiest to plant, the earliest to harvest and the least susceptible to disease.
If you plant bulbous onions, they can be identified as white, red or yellow rather than by variety name. They should be planted in winter, between February and April. More information on when to plant onions can be found here. If you are looking for more information on the technique of planting bulbils, it is similar to that of the ai to which we had already devoted a nice article. More information to discover here.
Watering the onion
Onions do not like excess humidity. In more humid regions like in the North of France, we like to plant it at the top of a small hill so that the water does not stagnate around the bulbils which could rot. This does not mean that you should leave the onion without water during a drought. The easiest technique is to open a small trench between the rows and fill it with water, which will feed the roots, while leaving most of the soil surface dry.
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