My onions did horrible this year. They either bolted or grew to the size of quarters then layed over and died. I'm pulling them all today. :(

ditto boomersooner.

Quailhunter,

Congratulations on the birth of your child! I hope y'all are getting some sleep!

I still have onions growing and going although I lost quite a few during the month after I planted them...we were just so cold and so wet that they just didn't take off and grow. Of the ones remaining, amazingly, none have bolted, but none of them are as big as usual either.

I have grown Southern Belle Red several times and like it, and may go back to growing it instead of Candy Apple Red, which just doesn't size up for me like Candy does, even though I gave it extra nitrogen as Dixondale suggested.

Across the board, among folks I know, most here have had a horrible onion year and many had both their onions and their broccoli bolt early. They must have planted 'on time'. I planted late and didn't have any bolting of eaither.

I expect I'll be harvesting onions in late June or early July unless some sort of pest/insect disaster strikes suddenly, but the crop will be below average in terms of quantity.

Dawn

I had sorry onion crop this year too - they are bolting early and most of them have thick necks, almost no bulb. Any explanations for that? I planted all sets(bulbs), no plants.

Thanks. She's kind of a tough customer. Definitely more difficult than her big brother was. I guess that's what I've got to look forward to having a daughter. : )

I finally got to spend about 4 hours in the garden this afternoon. It looks pretty good. I had to replant the sweet potato slips. They came in today. Rabbits wiped out the first ones the first night they were out. They now have bird netting over them.

It's always something!

I would say that I was able to harvest close to 200 onions. If it didn't bolt, it made a pretty good bulb. Time will tell on storage. Like I said, they got hit with a fungus really bad.

I think I will just plant reds next year. Thats what we like on everything anyway.

I'm just days away from squash and tomatoes.

Farmgardener,

Likely the sets were the problem. Most of the sets sold in the USA are for northern types of onions that are not suitable for growing in southern states because they do not bulb up. It isn't anything you can prevent (other than not using sets) because most onions are day-length sensitive (only a few of the newer hybrids are day-length neutral) and will not form bulbs if they do not receive the right daylength---and northern sets will never receive the right daylength in the south. Sets drove my dad nuts in the 1960s and he never got onion bulbs until he switched to planting plants instead, which probably was in the 1970s. I've only seen sets sold one year that specified "southern type" on the label and the store that carried them (our local Wal-mart) never carried them again, so I'm thinking they must not have worked out well either.

Quailhunter,

A daughter! I think that is wonderful but you may not get a good night's sleep until after she's married. (grinning as I say that)

We have a lot of rabbits this year too, so I guess next year will be a bad coyote year since one always follows the other.

My sweet potato plants are doing surprisingly well considering the brutal heat started up so soon after I planted them. I'm trying 20 new varieties this year, and "Bugs Bunny" is my favorite because of the name.

"It's always something" is so true. I never have a year in which every single vegetable has a great year all at once. There's always one or more vegetable that has a lousy year.

Two hundred onions is still a lot, although I do seem to remember that you planted a lot too.

Yum yum on the squash and tomatoes. So far the squash bugs and SVBs haven't found our plants, which is fairly rare, and we're having a great tomato year, knock on wood. If the heat stays high though, I'm worried the tomato year won't last real long.

I bet it felt good to be out in the garden even if you had to replant because of the rabbits. I try so hard to fence them out of the garden and keep them out, but what has worked best for me is to put a couple of handfuls of henscratch in the same place every evening....and not too far from the garden. The rabbits show up at sunset to eat the henscratch and they leave the fenced garden alone. I just decided after fighting the rabbits for years (they always seem to find a way under or through the fence) that I'd rather distract them instead. It has worked pretty well, and since we always have henscratch for the chickens, it is a simple solution for us. Our granddaughter's favorite "job" is to put out the henscratch for the rabbits...and sometimes she is lucky and gets to watch them come and eat. Lately, we have three young rabbits that come hopping, rolling, tumbling and playing their way across the front pasture to come to the henscratch to eat. We call them Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail and they are just as entertaining as can be, but I wouldn't be laughing at their antics if I found them inside the garden instead of seeing them outside of it.

Dawn

Overall my onions are looking good. I've had several bolt but not near as many as I expected with the late frosts/freezes. Those on the east end bolted the worst. I think it is because they are more exposed. aces. I have 1015Y in two places. On the east end a few bolted. In the middle of the sixty foot rows where I have the other bunch maybe one bolted. They are bulbing now. I expect mine to be ready in late June/early July. Surprises me that mine might be ready about the time that Dawn's is. Southern Belle Red is about the size of a hen egg now. Like Dawn I think this may be my last year for Candy Apple Red. My nitrogen levels are extremely high. Have tests to prove it. The plants look great just no sign of bulbing again. Maybe they will surprise me.

I dropped Red Zeppelin because it wouldn't bulb here. Growing Mars and Candy Apple Red for reds this year. If neither bulb up good think I'll order Red Bull from another source next year. The best red I've grown here and Dixondale discontinued it around 2-3 years ago.

I should have over 300 to pull when it is time. Depending on how they bulb up matters how many pounds I have. I'm going to keep good records this year and cull any varieties that don't get fair sized. Jay

In defense of all the varieties I planted, they were all buried in snow for about a day and a half. But...so were the onions last year (Candy and Red Candy) and not a single onion bolted. Except for that snow we had this year, I would say we had weather that has been favorable for onions around Tulsa. I planted in early March and don't recall a single long "cold" spell (for several days anyway) that my onions were exposed to--just that late March snow.

I've noticed a couple of squash bugs on my squash. I'll try to pick them off this afternoon. They really gross me out. I think the fact that they stink tops it all off for me. They're just nasty.

Also, I have what I'm sure is a hornworm on my tomatoes. I've got 16 plants in a row, so he's hard to find and I'm red/green colorblind to top it off. I've looked for him the last two evenings with no luck. It's so early that I bet he's small. I've never seen one this early, but I'm sure that's what it is.

Jay,

My onions were stunted for so long because the ground was so incredibly wet for all of March. For a while I thought they were going to sit there and never grow at all...not one single sign of growth for about six weeks...and that was in a raised bed! If I'd had them at grade level, I think I would have lost every single one of them. So, even though they went into the ground probably in earliest March, they were snowed on twice and sat in wet soil and didn't act alive until early April, so I'm guesstimating my harvest date based on that six week 'no growth' period. Otherwise, I'd likely be harvesting a couple of weeks earlier than I expect to.

Quailhunter,

I detest squash bugs and hate stink bugs even more. In fact, most years my worst pests are stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs and it is very hard to do anything about them except squish them and then have to smell that stinky smell!

I have seen hornworms on my angel's trumpets, which are overwintered in the garage, and placed outside on the patio on sunny winter and spring days, as early as March some years and when they are that early, the small hornworms often move to the tomato plants in March and April.

You also might want to watch for blister beetles on the tomato plants. They devour tomato foliage incredibly fast and there have been times that friends of mine have thought they were seeing hornworm damage and they were seeing blister beetle damage, because we found blister beetles on their plants and never found hornworms.

I have seen the solid black and the striped blister beetles around our place since mid-May. They usually arrive here in July or August, but often their numbers are so low that I just completely ignore them because the damage they do is minimal. In a year when they arrive in May, the population usually skyrockets by mid-June, and apparently that is happening here in Love County right now.

I was at the fire station several miles north of our house for a fundraiser garage sale yesterday, and the building was full of half-grown blister beetles. They were all over the place....hundreds of them! Another firefighter's wife/mom (like me, her spouse is a firefighter and so is her son, and now her daughter is one too) pointed them out to me and told me they'd been killing them like crazy the last two days. Seeing such large numbers of blister beetles this early is not good. Just like hornworms, they'll strip your plants in just a couple of days.

My favorite way to 'control' blister beetles is to go out to the garden in the cool early morning hours or evening hours with a pair of scissors in my hands (my favorites are my Fiskars garden scissors). I stand and scan the tomato foliage for blister beetles, and when I see one, I snip it in half with the scissors. I wear disposable latex medical gloves (I HATE touching insects with my bare hands, so have a box of the medical gloves in my laundry room, my garage and my potting shed) because if you touch a blister beetle, you'll get a blister! Sometimes I'll see one or two, sometimes I'll see dozens, although I try to control them before we arrive at the state of having 'dozens'. By the way, after I am through snipping blister beetles in half, I clean the scissor blades with a paper towel squirted with a Chlorox bleach/water solution to remove any bug 'guts' that might be on the blades and to sanitize the scissors. Then, I remove and toss the gloves. I've only had one blister from a blister beetle in all the years we've been here.

With the hornworms, sometimes they're easier to find at night just before sunset or even after dark with a flashlight.

I hope you find your hornworms, but wanted you to be aware that blister beetles do similar damage to the plant foliage.

We're having a huge bug explosion in southern OK and northcentral Texas and I think maybe those of you in other parts of the state are seeing the same thing? I need to write a thread about it. I believe this is the worst bug season I've seen since we moved here in 1999---it reminds me of 1998 which was similarly hot and miserable and had huge insects levels too. We were up here on weekends in 1998 and construction of our house started in August of that year. It seemed like we had more grasshoppers than grass in 1998. I hope this summer is not a repeat of that year.

Dawn

Congrats on your new daughter!! I had four boys before I finally got a daughter for number 5... and then again for number 6. LOL They are most definitely different creatures than boys!

I've just pulled all of my onions. I've had a really bad year with onions, due to my hubby's accident, followed by digging dog, topped off by goat & chicken munching x 2. I've cried uncle and dug up what I could salvage. LOL

Diane

Diane,

You have had a 'Survivor' kind of year there, and at least all you people are surviving!!!! I hope DH is continuing to recover well, and I did think it was especially nice that baby Josie followed Nellie so Nellie would have a sister to go along with all her brothers. You girls are still outnumbered though.

Dawn