I have had a lot of sporadic damage like that. It is interesting to me that one onion will be a nice size and look really good and then one right beside it will have rot and mold issues. After curing the final harvest for about a week, I decided most of the onions did not look like they were going to store well----they had so much moisture still in them after curing all week that I cut up most of them and froze them in individual freezer bags containing enough onions per bag for one batch of salsa. I feared they would develop mold and rot in dry storage. We got a decent yield from the garden considering those poor onion plants had to endure flooding rainfall over and over again, but none of the harvest will store well. We've eaten a lot fresh since I harvested the short-day types in May, and frozen a lot from the intermediate day and long-day types (harvested early before the last 8" of rain fell). There have been years where the heavy rain (though not this heavy) fell while the soil was a lot colder and we lost more of those onions than we lost this year, so I'm just happy to have any onion harvest at all given that there was standing water in the garden for virtually the whole month of May. Without raised beds, I don't think we would have gotten a single onion worth harvesting.

I tossed the moldy one and the one with holes. The ones I cut up might have been working on bolting or internally they looked like 2 onions grown together...almost like a shallot. Don't know if that had anything to do with their problems. Most of my white onions aren't dry enough. I will have to keep an eye on them. Do you have any tricks for removing the skin from lots of onions?

I noticed when I was processing all the onions for the freezer (hurriedly so I could get them done before they could even think about rotting) that I had a lot of onions doing the same thing. I assume they were trying to bolt, but then really failed to follow through as none of them had any new external leaves or stalks forming that looked like bolting was about to occur. I wondered if they were trying to bolt at the time the soil got so wet that they then went into what seemed like a permanent stall.

If there is a trick to removing the skin from a lot of onions, I don't know what it is. I processed the last 5 gallons of onions a few days ago and it took me forever. I set up a white folding table out by the compost pile and cut off all the roots and leaves out there and tried to peel off as much of the dirty, yucky-looking outer skin right out there. Then I carried them inside, washed them and removed the rest of the skin. With some of them, the skin was so thin and weak (because I harvested them before they began yellowing, since it seemed the leaves weren't going to yellow and wither) that it took me forever.

My only onion trick is that when I am processing a large amount of them for the freezer or for salsa-making, I wear ordinary safety goggles----the kind you wear when operating woodworking equipment. Mine are the Stanley Tools brand, but Pampered Chef sells actual onion goggles for about 3 times what I paid for my goggles at Home Depot or Lowe's a long time ago. I can process onions all day without shedding a tear if I am wearing my onion goggles.

Oh, and I take it back, I do have a second onion trick: when freezing them, I freeze them in amounts pre-measured for cooking and canning recipes, putting the pre-measured amounts in labeled, quart ziplock freezer bags. Then I double bag them, sometimes by putting a bunch of filled quart-sizes bags inside gallon freezer bags and other times just putting one quart bag inside another. The first time I ever froze a bunch of onions many years ago, I only single-bagged them and my freezer smelled like onions forever after. That was an incredible onion year and I froze enough onions to use in cooking for three years. I bet my freezer smelled like onions for at least 4 years. It is not a mistake I've ever made since then. The freezer smelled so strongly of onions that all I had to do was open the freezer door and the onion odor would escape and the house would smell of onions for the rest of the day. Eventually the freezer stopped smelling of onions, but it took it a long time.

I think this year's onions must be weaker than onions from most years. Even though I had my onion goggles lying on the counter beside me while processing that last 5-gallon bucket of them, I never really had to put them on. So, if I could process 5 gallons of onions without goggles without crying, then I think the onions are pretty mild this year. The flavor is okay though.

Thanks for the tips. I'm getting ready to freeze some. I would have hated to have onion odor in the freezer. My onions are 'meh', too.

Those red onions made 4 small bags, the amount looked about right for a meal for us. I haven't noticed an odor, but I guess I should put them in another bag. I just knew Dawn would have an easy way to peel onions. Rats. I had just washed dishes when I cut thos onions and my nails were soft and bendy. I had a devil of a time getting that thin skin off. I'm starting to realize storage is an issue with a bigger garden. It's a cascading effect...

I wish I did have a fast, easy way to peel a raw onion, but I just don't.

There are things my dad did when canning that I wished I'd paid more attention to at the time, but I was just a kid. I don't remember how he peeled peaches, so I always just peeled peaches by hand with a paring knife until the year that our peach/plum trees combined to give us almost 400 lbs. of fruit. After frantically peeling by hand as fast as I could and realizing the peaches would rot before I got even half of them peeled, I Googled and learned I could drop the peaches in boiling water the same way you do tomatoes to peel them quickly, and it changed my life! Now when I make peach jelly (which I'm going to make today), that's the method I use. It works with stone fruit or tomatoes you're going to process but I don't think it would work with onions, though I've never tried it.

Well, I googled peeling onions. One said soak in water overnight or just wet the skin. Best suggestion was get someone else to do it. Many said they take off the first layer and don't try to peel it. A lot of people say they save the skins and tops and bottoms for stock. Mine are pretty dirty for that, LOL. And my hope with store bought is that peeling will eliminate whatever bad stuff might have been on it. But maybe if soaked over night, home grown would be clean enough. I'll try it on one onion and see what it does. I think the fresher they are the harder it is to peel.

"Best suggestion was get someone else to do it." Oh my, I laughed so hard at that. I do think that the fresher they are, the harder they are to peel, and there have been times I've sacrificed the outer layer to get the darn thing peeled, but I don't like to do that routinely as it means wasting one layer of onion flesh.

Today I am making peach jelly, so actually did boil the water and drop the peaches into it to make the skins peel off easily. The juice is straining now while the chickens are eating a pile of peach skin I carried out to them. I was thinking how wonderful it would be if we could do that with onions.....and potatoes too.

This is my week to keep the blinders on and focus solely on processing the harvest that's piling up everywhere. It was really hard not to slip out to the garden early this morning in the cool air to weed for a couple of hours, but I knew I needed to remain focused on the planned tasks for today. All the plums are harvested and most of the peaches, so after this week y'all shouldn't "hear" the words 'plum' or 'peach' again from me for another 8 or 10 months....when the trees inevitably will try to bloom too early as always. I'm so grateful for the fruit harvest, and simultaneously amazed that the storms and excess rainfall didn't ruin all of it. While they got a lot of the plums and peaches, we still got plenty, so I'm a happy camper.

The white onions peeled easily. I soaked them in a bowl breifly. The purple onions were still a pain to peel. I sliced myself on the first onion with the mandolin. I do it once EVERY TIME I use it. I don't know if the mandolin and chopper saved time, but just think what I could have done to my fingers with a knife. The rest of the onions will go in the pantry.

I have walking onions that I started this year. I don't know how to use them. I planned to leave them this year to get established, but do you pull them like onions or use them as scallions?