You can harvest them at any stage of development and the "fall over" is open to a wide interpretation. You can even define it as tops are totally dead and brown. That just makes them a bit harder to find to pull. ;-)

Dave

You can harvest and use them at any time but for best long term storage it is best to wait for the neck to soften and fall over. Leaving them in the ground for an extra week or 2 normally isn't a problem unless it is going to be very wet which can cause some rotting.

I harvested quite a few of mine yesterday. Copra is the only variety that are all still standing.

LOL for a discontinued variety, Copra, is still widely planted....

Our Candys have turned brown and need to get harvested, but the garlic was more urgent. The Copras and Reds are still green and standing. I'll plant Copras as long as they are available.

I will continue to plant Copra as long as I can get it too. I have quite a few seedlings that were not thinned and some late planted plants, that I am hoping to turn into sets for next spring. I was counting on my multipliers for this year's onion crop but that bed got destroyed leaving me with little beyond some seed sets for next fall, and not even really enough for that. So I will be hoping to make up for the loss next year and revert to buying my cooking onions until then.

In the past I have found that replanting the smaller of the Copra harvest to grow on another year almost never resulted in bolting, but did result in increased bulb size; so once I get re-established I will be replanting not just last year's seedlings, but also last year's smallest bulbs for another year's growth, and only cooking with the largest.

I like Copra a lot. Even the sizes are right, since I live by myself and do not need gigantic onions for the kitchen. The alternative for me when Copra finally actually disappears will be to go back to Stuttgarter sets. That's what I grew up with and they never failed in my mother's garden that I remember.

OldDutch - I WISH cool nights were a thing for me! At this time of the summer I see overnight lows down to 75 - 80 in the hottest conditions...like I'm about to experience in the next few day. A few days ago the lows were down to about 65 and it felt like heaven on my morning walk!

I pulled some onions yesterday that had fallen over or were well on their way to that condition. I shaded them with some straw. I will gather them from the garden tonight and start searching for my initial curing site. I may leave some in the ground until they totally dry as a case study in which technique works better.

Unless you get a real wet spell, leaving them in the ground works out ok, but the danger is that the dried up stems get rubbed off or blown away; so you may not be able to find them all. I lift my onions and cure in my screen porch which gets hot in the summer sun and stays hot most of the night. Curing temps actually need to be higher than storage ones. The onions, (and tulips and garlics, too) dry out as part of the curing process and actually change to a more stable mature feature, very often with a stronger, sweeter, richer flavor during the cure. (I suppose the tulips also change, but I don't eat them; so I don't know about their cured flavor, but the seem to hold dormancy longer, if dug early and allowed to dry completely in warm shade.)

Ha! Wet spell in south central Kansas in the summer? I wish! I suppose it COULD happen. We have had a total of about 2.5” in two different storms over the last several days. We needed it. First rains all month.

My red onions are still green and upright and a few of them are now putting out flower bulbs. Wondering if I should pull them now? And does anyone know why mine are setting flowers instead of falling over?

Trim off the flower buds as soon as you can. Sometimes that saves the particular bulb, but the appearance of scattered bolters is not a signal to harvest the whole planting.

There is no real accounting for why some onions flower and some don't, except that fall planted ones tend to flower more often than spring planted ones. With sets the deeper one plants the more likely to get bolting to flower.

And some varieties are more likely to bolt than others. All my Copra (and the multipliers of course) were sets this spring and not a single bolter in either one. My Copra are also starting to put on size. I have been planting back undersized Copra bulbs to get another year of growth now for some years and I do not remember ever having a bolter. I hope that whatever replaces Copra is as dependable.

My over wintered Welsh onions and the walking ones all bolted, and even some spring planted scallion types did, that is just what they do.

OH....that reminds me, I didn't plant last fall, but I bought plants from Johnny's this year, not sets. So maybe those were from last fall? I will cut them off tomorrow. Thank you!

Johnny's like nearly every other mail order nursery almost certainly has current season onion plants shipped directly from the grower to their customer. So that is probably not the cause. If you only have a couple or a very few bolting, that is not unusual. I wouldn't worry about it unless you have a major percentage that bolt. In that case contact Johnny's about it.

Onions are not like leeks in that you plant onions shallow, and do not hill up around the shank like you do leeks. Onions should be bulbing at the surface, in fact as much as a half and more exposed.

Thank you for that info. Yes, my onions are bulbing and I can see quite a bit of the top of the bulb showing. I cut off the flower tips I found and I have a small patch of onions, so I think it is a big percentage. I'll give Johnny's a call. Thanks.

If you catch the flower heads very early, sometimes your bulbs develop normally, otherwise there is usually a heavy flowering stem and a smaller side bulb which does not store well growing out of the basal plate. Those side bulbs are perfectly usable at and for some short while after harvest. So use them first.

I have to admit that it has been a long time since I had an onion bolt, whether from seed, plant or set. I suspect that onions can be planted too deep or perhaps mulched too deep, but I know that bolting plagues quite a few very competent gardeners.

I have also heard that some seasons and some varieties are more prone to this than others. I am not especially careful although I tend to only grow Copra, which for me were all sets mostly that I grew from seed last year with a few carryovers of the smallest bulbs from last year's main crop. There were all sizes from very tiny to about shallot size without one bolting yet this year anyway. How I escape what is a plague to others I do not know, but I am going to miss Copra.

I let mine dry fully before pulling them. Why the rush? If you need one, pull one.

Wayne - That's what I'm doing these days. One variety (Red Candy Apple) has almost all fallen over, but there's still some green in the tops. Candy is the next-most flopped over variety. I have so many good sized onions again this year, I want to maximize storage-ability. Guess I'll keep using them as I need them and pull them when they're mostly dried up.

As was said above, you can lift onions at any time, but for storage you should wait until the necks are soft or later.

Re bolting, onions form a bulb in their first year, and then bolt to seed in their second year. If your transplants are exposed to a cold snap, it may trick them into "thinking" they are in their second year and then bolt. Back in 2008 had about half of my onions bolt and wrote to my supplier Dixondale Farm. Here is their reply:

Onions and other commercially cultivated alliums are biennial plants, which means that it usually takes them two growing seasons to go from seed to seed. The first season is when we take it from a seed to a transplant. When you plant the plant, it begins its second season. Given a certain set of environmental conditions, onions can be tricked into believing they have gone through two growing cycles during their first year. Instead of finishing with a well-cured bulb, ready for the market, a seed stalk can develop prematurely, causing onions to be unmarketable. While it is impossible to control the weather, planting at the correct time for the variety in question is the most important factor to limit premature bolting. Over-fertilizing can also contribute to bolting - if onions are too vigorous, too early in their development, bolting can result. Onions bolt as a reaction to cold weather stress. Temperatures under 45F may cause the onion to bolt when the plant has five or more leaves. Some onions are more or less susceptible to bolting than others and the process is not completely understood. Unfortunately once the onion does bolt, the quality of the onion bulb deteriorates rapidly and it should be harvested and eaten as quickly as possible.

The lack of bolting is one of the reasons I am going to miss Copra. Whether from seed, sets of any size, or plants, I have yet to have the first one bolt in decades of gardening.

Between the current hot weather and frequent thunderstorms all my Copras this year are going over, but still real green, and hopefully will add a bit more size to the bulbs.. We shall see what the next week brings.