I don't get it. Why do we plant in Feb then? I guess it's not supposed to effect them when they are younger. I have a couple bolting, too.

I noticed many of mine are bolting also. This has not been a good year for my garden.

We plant them in February because they are cool-season plants that make their best growth in cooler conditions. What is important to remember about almost all of the onion varieties currently available is that they bulb up in response to daylength---the number of hours of sunlight they receive per day. If you are growing a variety that starts bulbing up when daylength reaches 12 hours per day, it will begin to bulb up at that daylength whether the onion plant has been in the ground for 1 week, 6 weeks or 12 weeks. Hence, we have to plant them far enough in advance of their specific daylength to ensure they can make maximum growth before that daylength arrives if we want onions of a decent size.. In general, for our climate and our known daylength, that means we are planting onions in February or March. The later you plant them, the smaller your final onions will be.

To make it more complicated, onions are biennials. Biennials grow over two seasons, flowering and setting seed in their second season. Plants do not operate on a human calendar or human years. They respond to temperatures, daylength, etc. in whatever manner they're programmed by their DNA to respond. So, when the supplier plants their seeds and grows their onion plants in fall or winter, the onions have begun their first year. A few weeks or months later, we buy those plants and plant them. Assuming they were roughly 1/4" or smaller in diameter (roughly the size of a No. 2 pencil) when we received and planted them, they resume growth while small enough that they are still in their first year, so far. Got it?

What happens after that is largely beyond our control. If they grow at a nice, steady consistent rate with plentiful moisture and the temperatures they like and need, they'll just keep growing until they reach a point where the number of hours of sunlight in a day tells them it is time to bulb up. In a year where things work the way they're supposed to, we get nice, big, fat, flavorful onions. If they are subjected to wildly fluctuating temperatures, and particularly to about a week of low temperatures below roughly 45 degrees, that cold period is perceived by the onions as the dormant period between their first year of growth and their second year. Thus, when the weather warms back up, they do what a biennial is supposed to do in its second year---they flower and form seeds. While we don't care for this part of the process, it is a biological imperative----they have to flower and form seed to ensure their species and kind survive. It isn't like the onions sit there and choose to bolt----they're just doing what they are supposed to do.

Daytime temperatures also play a role. As long as our daytime highs stay around 70 degrees or below, the onions just keep growing. Once temperatures are regularly exceeding that benchmark, it is a combination of the temperature and the daylength that triggers the onions to bulb up. This is why we cannot wait until April 1st to plant our onions---because our temperatures would be telling them it was time to bulb up fairly soon and we'd get onion bulbs the size of grapes.

There's a couple of things a gardener can do to try to minimize the risk of bolting, but since gardeners do not and can not control nature, you can only minimize the risk to a certain degree.

One thing you can do is not plant any onion plants that are larger than that 1/4" diameter size. I plant them, but not in the expectation that they'll bulb up just fine. I pull all the larger ones from the bundle before I plant and set them aside. Then I plant the onion plants that are the right size using the proper spacing. When I'm done, I come back and plant all the ones larger than 1/4" in diameter in a straight row, 1" apart, alongside the edge of the raised bed. Then, we use them throughout the spring and early summer as scallions/green onions, harvesting them as needed. If they do indeed start to bolt (the don't always, because sometimes we don't have enough late cold temperatures to cause that), I go ahead and harvest them all, slice them up and freeze them in small quantities for use as cooking scallions.

Another thing you can do is to plant a variety of daylengths, hoping that if the onions of one daylength bolt, perhaps the ones of another daylength won't bolt. Sometimes that works out well and sometimes it doesn't. It just all hinges on the weather. I've always grown both short day and intermediate daylength onions, but beginning last year I added a couple of long daylength onions to the mix and it worked wonderfully.

Last year, some of the onions I got from Dixondale were obviously far too big and I felt certain they would bolt. They did. The rest of the onions did just fine though. So, I think it is important to remember that 1/4" diameter size when buying onion plants. There is one distinct disadvantage to buying onion plants online and that is that you're at the mercy of the field worker who grabs a handful of the onion plants, pulls them out of the ground, bundles them and sends them to the order packing/shipping area. That worker is merely grabbing clumps of onions out of the ground, not looking at each individual plant and discarding any over 1/4" in diameter. I imagine each field worker pulls thousands of handfuls of onion plants per day and there isn't time to look at them individual and discard the bigger ones. For better control of the size onions you plant, you'd need to buy them at the store so you could choose a bundle that had onion plants that are the right size. My experience with that is that all the bundles are a mix of sizes, so even if you select your bundle out of the crate at the store, some of the onions in it likely will be big enough to bolt.

So, as gardeners, we are trying to plant the onion plants as early as we reasonably can so that they have maximum growing time in the ground before the combination of daylength and temperature tells them to start bulbing up. At the same time, we are hoping that we're waiting late enough in spring to ensure the plants are not exposed to many nights at or below 45 degrees while also planting early enough to ensure they can grow as long as possible before the daytime highs start regularly exceeding 70-75 degrees. Y'all know how our temperatures fluctuate wildly some years----it can be just about impossible to give onion plants a decent period of time where they largely are growing above 45 degrees and below 70-75 degrees. You can be the most skillful gardener on earth and you can do everything by the book as recommended, but it still takes luck to get a good onion harvest. Our weather doesn't seem inclined to throw much good luck our way, does it?

None of my onions have bolted, but I know exactly how much my temperatures have fluctuated and I totally expect some of my onions will bolt. Some years a lot of them bolt, other years only a few do. It's the luck of the draw, depending on what weather we had and on what size the onions were when we had those cold nights.

Once they send up that flower stalk, you have two choices: (1) Immediately pull them and use them. Since the stalk splits the onion bulb in half, it can go bad pretty quickly as moisture can seep into the split and make the onions begin to soften and rot. Or, (2) leave some in the garden and let them flower. They are lovely flowers and attract a ton of tiny beneficial insects, including pollinators, that you want to have visiting your garden.

Kim, No point in crying over something you cannot control!

Dawn

True Dawn true. But I would be sad for a minute. but could I cover them on the nights its supposed to get below 50?

You can cover them whenever you want, but it is unlikely at this late date to make much difference. It would have been more effective if it were done from the start.

If using plastic, don't forget to take it off early every morning because you don't want to roast your onions in the kind of daytime highs we're having now. If you are using a fabric row cover, you can leave it on later in the morning if you choose, but remember that it blocks a percentage of the sunlight the plants receive, so the longer you leave it on, the longer they are growing in less than optimal light.

My daylength and daytime highs are now in the range here where both the short-day and intermediate-daylength onions are bulbing up already. The short-day ones I'm growing are pretty short DTM so I likely will be harvesting them by the end of May. Since they were planted late, they are only going to be about 50% their usual size. The intermediates usually aren't ready to harvest until late June or early July, depending on the variety, so they should continue bulbing for a long time and make nice big onions. All of the above is contingent on them not bolting. The happiest onions are the long daylength types. They are producing monster-sized leaves and plenty of them. The comparison between the size of last year's plants (in year 3 of perpetually dry/drought conditions) and this year's plants in a very rainy spring is astonishing. I think I had forgotten how happy onions can be in a year when rain actually falls from the sky in decent amounts.That still doesn't mean they won't bolt because our weather has been seesawing wildly from hot to cold all winter and spring, but I don't think all of them will bolt.

Kim - you are wise. You sure you're a newbie to this group? I could SWEAR you have knowledge that only old-timers here have...hehe!

You are right. Give it up. It is...what it IS. Just roll with it. It's what makes gardening in our region fun...well, maybe not "fun" but interesting.

My onions are almost a total wash-out. Got Dixondale's at Atwoods, planted at the right time...under row-covers...and the @$@%! crab-grass in that bed sucked the life out of them. Oh well...as every gardener says..."there's always next year!"

I've fought crabgrass pretty hard in my onion bed too. It is like every seed that has made it into the garden in the last three drought years all sprouted in this year's wet weather. I've been trying to pull out the new sprouts as soon as they are big enough for two fingers to grab them and hang on to them. So, the crab grass hasn't sucked the life out of my onions, but they've sucked the life out of my hands. I was noticing yesterday that I need to weed the onion bed again.

Every year it is something.....I never get a big harvest from every single thing in every year. The onions are still good so far, but you never know. They all still could bolt. We and our gardens are at the mercy of Mother Nature. I try to overplant everything I grow so that the weather, the pests and disease can take some of the plants and there still will be plenty for us. Most years, that strategy works pretty well.

I have some onions that I started from seed, too late to make big plants. My plan is to either try to get sets from them or leave them over winter and let them go to seed next year. (I didn't want to waste the seeds, since I read they are short lived). Does anyone save seed from open polinated onions? I know my dixondale are hybrids.

Dawn is rubbing off on me YAY!!!

I don't have the energy to cover uncover. I am very busy pulling careless weeds and planting squashes