I would and trim them. I pull mine as soon as they break over now because of how wet it is.

Also I laid mine on boxes and paper so it will help absorb some of the moisture. My chicken wire rack works great but isn't big enough for all my onions

ty! The paper and cardboard is a very good idea.

This is what I do to dry mine. It takes 7-10 days in my garage. Maybe shorter since it's going to be almost 100 for the next few days.

Bon, Are you seeing an external fungus like blue mold or something on them? Or, is the reason they look too wet because the bulb looks water-soaked and feels soft to the touch? If it is blue mold, drying them usually halts it in its tracks. If they already are going soft and squishy, you cannot save those and I'd toss them on the compost pile so the rot cannot spread to your still-healthy onions.

Rain is the root of all evil in our gardens, isn't it? Too little and the plants may fail to thrive. Too much, and they get diseases.

osuengineer, I love that image of your onions hanging. You have a lot of nice, big ones.

Dawn

I felt of the necks and they were soft and squishy where, previously, they were dry except for the inside. Today, they are back to drying. I guess the humidity has been too high. I haven't checked. Lesson learned for next year!

I do think many of these have the beginnings of mold. Like a thin dusty exterior. I'll just chalk it up from experience and blame the weather.

would it be best to chop these up and freeze? That being said, I do have some that look 'okay', but mostly they just don't look as nice and clean as other people's pictures on here.

The candy apples are the worst, btw. I planted these in clay, but the others were in sandy beds.

BTW, these were Dixondales, but those sold at the local grocer. If someone doesn't step up to the plate, I'll do the Dixondale order next year (I'm not complaining to our wonderful Dixondale orderer).

Your onions look really good osuengineer. I will spend the winter rigging up our little storage shed or part of one of the houses for the onions next year. I think I harvested a couple hundred. I could probably get away with a similar harvest next year and be good with freezer and fresh stock for a good while after that.

And, again, thank you for your original onion post about starting onions from seed. I should really try this again as it produces the strongest and healthiest onions I've grown yet. We plowed the garden the following spring so I really didn't get to see those onions which I started from seed to full maturity, but they insisted upon growing and I would find them as I was digging. They were healthy, strong and tasty. I think it was Spanish onion variety I started from seed.

I'll probably order Dixondale next year while starting some samplers from seed to establish a habit and gain more experience. It's not easy raising onions from seed.

Well Bon, mine are not too wet, just too little. LOL I planted two raised beds of onions and then scattered more in various places across the garden. They were in two new raised beds and I just didn't get them right. I also think they didn't get enough water early-on after they were planted. My granddaughter watered them a few times for me, but I don't think they got enough water. Later in the season, I planted 3 hot pepper plants in the same bed and they did fine. Well they did fine for awhile, until they were blooming and the same granddaughter (who hadn't been out there for weeks) decided to pull the 'weeds' out of the onion bed to feed to the ducks. We caught her just before she stuffed them in the pen, and I replanted the pulled plants in a new location not expecting them to live. Two are now just stems, but the third ones looks like it might live, but if so, I don't know that it will recover enough to produce. No, not a young child, just a 16 year old who doesn't know about plants.

The ones in the in-ground garden look much larger, but still haven't fallen over.

My husband is only allowed to pull bermuda and crabgrass. The lemon grass is driving him crazy, and the salsify. He wanted to do square foot gardening, with neat little grids and each grid filled with something different. I'm a mix it up jungle kind of girl. His OCD makes him twitch when he looks at the garden. Finally some one at work told him it was companion planting and, since it came from someone other than me, he thinks it might be ok.

Wow, Carol. I bet she felt bad. I guess I'm not surprised yours aren't done yet. You're a little cooler in your area. I'm still very pleased. Even if I must chop them all, I have onions. Yay!

My kids are that way, Amy. I dunno why! *shrugs*
"Mom, did you know?"
"Shuddup, son, I told you this already."
bon

Amy, my garden would drive him crazy. I plant like Dawn, in crazy quilt style. Actually, I planted in groupings this year, more or less. My tomato plants are planted 2-4 in a group. Sometime they are the same kind, but mostly they are 3 different kinds in groups of 3, and are planted close together. The way they are branching out, it will probably look like I have red, yellow, and black on the same plant, because the cages are touching and the plants are full. So far they are looking fine except that I did yank out one a couple of weeks ago that just wasn't thriving. That group had 4 tomato plants, two peppers, one petunia, and a bright colored container with two flowers and an ornamental pepper. Everything was doing great except one wilting tomato plant. I just put it out of it's misery.

My husband grew up on a commercial rice farm so he thinks you have to fertilize everything and till everything. I rarely use fertilizer so our gardening skills are not compatible. LOL He helps when I ask for help, but otherwise I just plant the things he likes to snack on close to the walkway.

Amy, That is too funny. Tim is more of an OCD type too, but he is smart enough not to say one word about my jumbled-up, crazy quilt style of planting. He comes in the garden to help with heavy lifting and stuff, or maybe to harvest something that is obviously ripe (non-gardeners shouldn't guess about whether something is ripe), though he is good with tomatoes and he even understands that corking on jalapenos indicates they are at the perfect stage to harvest, but he is busy enough maintaining the part of the property that we mow that he doesn't even have to help weed the garden.

When I had lemon grass in my garden in our early years here, it did drive some of the old farmers and ranchers crazy. They kept telling me I needed to get rid of that weed, even though I told them repeatedly that it was lemon grass and that I was growing it on purpose. Purple ornamental millet also drovethem all crazy because it was the wrong color. Of course, if it was green millet, they probably would have found another reason not to like it.

Carol, Those poor pepper plants...and to think that she really was trying to be helpful. Of course, every time that Tim has destroyed a plant in my garden, he thought he was being helpful too. The worst thing to hear my husband say in the garden is "Um, this plant isn't a really special or important one, is it?" which tells me he just killed something, and I sort of hate to go over where he is to see just what he has done. This is why he mostly stays out of the garden.

You northerners have slow onions, but you know that they do fall over when they're ready, so I wouldn't worry about them. They know how to grow.

Bon, That's right, you have onions! That is the important thing. They are so sensitive to piddly things like way too much rain or way too much cold that we have to be happy with what we get since we cannot control the weather. Then, in a year when they are perfectly happy with both the temperatures and the rain, we wonder why it cannot always be that simple. Because they are onions, that's why.

Carol, Oh that is funny, and planting snackable things along the pathway is a great garden survival tool too. I mean, it helps the garden plants survive the husbands. I also plant Tim's favorite tomatoes right along the pathway so they are the first thing you see when you walk into the garden. That way he can find them easily (since they produce orange fruit) without wandering around wondering where all the plant labels are (generally they are buried in the mulch).

Dawn