Posts Tagged ‘Water Stress’

Onion (Semi) Disaster

A couple of months ago I had written a post about the onion patch, describing how I was still figuring out the water holding of my soil and had under-watered my main spring-planted onion crop in the weeks after transplanting.  Well, we’re now at the time of year that I should be harvesting these onions, and most of them have barely formed bulbs.   Onions are day length sensitive, and need to begin swelling bulbs while the days are still getting longer.  While they definitely put on more growth, the stress early on seems to have been too much for most of them.

On the bright side, I’m still able to harvest “spring” onions (fresh onions at a stage between scallion and full size), and I did get a good harvest from my extra-early set-grown onions.  They’ve been in the CSA offering four times now, and there are enough curing now for at least three more distributions.  Not the mega harvest I was hoping for, but hey ...not everything can go according to plan.

onion stress early on

“Spring” Onion Bunch