# Onions



## weedygarden (Apr 27, 2011)

I have a garden plot in a community garden, in addition to my garden in my yard. This will be my third year there, and this year I have a new plot! Yay! My old plot had many problems, one being a huge stump that made working around it difficult. Now it will be someone else's problem. Now I have a plot that is away from the edge where the weeds grow, get mowed, and the weed seeds get blown into the gardens on that edge. I do not have the invasive grassy weeds with subterranean roots in my new plot. I have a concrete walkway on one side which will give less pathway weeds to contend with. Mallow is all over this community garden and it seems that no one else notices it or cares about removing it.

The stump created an area where it was hard to work, so I planted onions around it. They grew for a little while and then stopped, even while the rest of the garden kept growing. I have been growing onions for most of my life, so it is not like I didn't know about growing them. This narrow section was harder soil and seemed to have more clay. I believe that is a problem with onions.

Most of the onions did not get very large. I had yellow onions, red onions, shallots, and leeks. I left them in the ground in the fall because they were puny! 

Today is the day we work in the garden to clean up and prep for the gardening season. I decided to pull up the onions because today, someone else will have my old plot while I have been working on my new plot. I will replant them in my new plot today.

The interesting thing is how well the onions were doing already. But the other interesting thing is that the yellow and red onions have split or doubled. Where there was one, there are now two. The shallots seemed to have multiplied. It seems that there are maybe 6 where there was 1. From what I see in the stores, they are about harvest size now. The leeks have not multiplied, but are much larger now. I am concerned about them going to seed, so I will harvest them if I see any signs of that.

I needed to get my onions in much earlier last year. That is another factor as to why they did not do as well as they should have last year. I was delayed because I was trying to build raised beds so I could keep amending the soil because Colorado clay needs it. I have that same thing going on this year with this new plot, but I am going to plant some sections without raised beds this year, and keep working on the raised beds as I get free cedar fence posts.

Last year I had some onion sets left over, and I tried to grow them indoor in pots being planted in the fall. That did not work. They grew for a little while, and then died. I now realize I would have been better off planting them in the garden in the fall and they would have come up this spring. 

Gardening is an ongoing learning process.


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## weedygarden (Apr 27, 2011)

*The Deliberate Agrarian and multiplier onions*

I have been reading this guys blog for a few years, and I will post about some of his other ideas at another time and in another thread.

http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/



> Rediscovering And Restoring The Multiplier Onion
> 
> One of the great things about writing this blog is that when I share some of the things I know, or believe, or have experienced, I hear from readers who know, or believe, or have experienced something different. Such feedback is often instructive or edifying, and that is the case with multiplier onions (a.k.a., potato onions).
> 
> ...


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## weedygarden (Apr 27, 2011)

*Potato onions, also know as multiplier onions, are not potatoes*

http://www.anniesbacktoedengarden.com/onionpotato.htm



> Potato Onions
> 
> The potato onion (also known as multiplier onion) is a variety of the 'Aggregatum group' of Allium cepa, similar to the shallot, although producing larger bulbs.
> 
> ...


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## bacpacker (Jul 15, 2011)

I grow a bunch of onions every yeaf (we eat onions almost once every da and sometimes twice). This year I bout my stock from www.dixondaleonions.com..
The slips looked really nice and have started growing off well. They have growing harvesting g guide I am trying to follow, so far so good. I tried 3 red types and 4 yellows, all supposedly good for storage. Their leeks are kicking g it even better.


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