There are some things I never forget: Where each plant in my garden came from. Who revealed to me the secret to growing carrots successfully (John Navazio, then senior scientist at the Organic Seed Alliance). Who shared the best strategy to keep tomato diseases at bay (Tom Stearns, founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds).
And who helped me understand the ins and outs of growing onions from seed: Don Tipping, the founder of Siskiyou Seeds, an organic farm seed company in Oregon.
Tipping, who founded the company in 1997, also remembers the origin of each piece of tactical wisdom he inherited from others, offering a grateful nod to his mentors along with his instruction. His onion teachings include ideas from two well-known organic farmers, one from each coast, and aphorisms from older traditions.
“The best fertilizer is the gardener's own shade,” he said, repeating a Chinese proverb that is not specific to onions, but that advises us to be observant. Instead of getting carried away by an avalanche of household chores, he advises us to carefully read the signs about what each particular crop needs.
It was by chance, about a decade ago, that Mr Tipping and I started talking about onions, or Allium cepa. Instead, we could have discussed any of the other open-pollinated vegetables, flowers, and herbs (culinary and medicinal) he was working with: breeding projects that have produced brightly colored bread corn, such as Oregon Blue and Siskiyou Pink, and a super resistant. Scottish Kale known as Alive Vates.
Lately, he's been busy taking cactus-like zinnias to fantastical extremes, including a fantastically curly fuchsia selection called Crazy Legs and others that approximate the look of underwater anemones (his Tidepool Mix).
Siskiyou, a family-owned operation at an elevation of 2,000 feet in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon, near the California border, has about 1,000 varieties in its collection, with about 700 available in any given year. There are other offerings, too: For 26 years, Mr. Tipping has provided training to organic gardeners and farmers, and is an enthusiastic creator of a long-running blog and instructional videos on YouTube.
“From the outside, our work may seem like we are just selling seeds,” he said. “But really what we're doing is providing a service: we're making the gardening experience easier.”
When we met, Mr. Tipping had been experimenting for more than a dozen years with the Walla Walla sweet onion, one of the best-known Spanish sweet varieties adapted to the north. His enthusiasm for the progress he had made, which resulted in a selection he called Siskiyou Sweet, sparked our initial conversation and my interest in trying to grow onions from seed.
Since then, I haven't bought mail-order onion seedlings (those $15 or $20 packages of 50 transplants). Instead, for about $5 a package of about 100 seeds, I can choose from a much wider range of sizes, shapes, colors and flavors than if I bought transplants (or sets of onions, those little bulbs that are the other possible source of departure).
In addition to a basic yellow workhorse like Newburg, you can try a strong-flavored red like Rossa di Milano and some types of round, flattened Cipollini like Borettana, an Italian heirloom dating back to the 15th century, or the red Cipolla di shaped like torpedo. Tropea. Be sure to also grow one specifically rated for long-term storage, perhaps Front Range Yellow Globe, to keep your homegrown onions for months.
Also important: choose an onion that suits your region or, specifically, your latitude.
Onions are classified according to the hours of light that each variety requires to initiate bulb formation. In the south, where onions are generally planted in fall and transplanted for late spring harvest, short-day varieties are the choice; In the northeast, where bulb formation occurs in summer from spring transplants, long-day varieties are indicated. Intermediate day types are suited to mid-latitudes.
Keep cell packs
Onions are one of the first crops planted during the indoor seed starting season in the Northeast (around early February) and are ready for transplanting eight to ten weeks later. At Siskiyou, seedlings start in a greenhouse; Home gardeners can grow theirs under lights.
Giant onions are not Mr. Tipping's ultimate goal. And cell packets (those commonly used seed starting trays with individual compartments) are not the place to go.
Instead, sow seeds in open flats (shallow boxes without compartments) for less restricted root growth, which is worth it, especially when the early spring weather is unstable and seedlings must wait a couple more weeks before from being released into the open field.
“They would suffer if they had to be held in cells like that,” he said.
Their floors are homemade, made of wood, but the commercial plastic ones with drainage holes work and a tray to collect water underneath.
Mr. Tipping fills each flat with a homemade potting mix of about 10 parts well-aged compost to one part sand, which improves drainage and helps limit surface algae growth and damp-causing diseases. . To each wheelbarrow load, he adds about a liter of crushed eggshells (for calcium) and a similar amount of powdered seaweed (for trace elements).
After filling in the flats, use your finger or a piece of wood to make four or five parallel grooves along the surface. Into those furrows sow eight to ten seeds per inch, covering them with about a quarter inch of the potting mix.
Each plant planted this way can produce several hundred transplants from a single onion. Gardeners who don't need as many can modify the layout: perhaps make just two or three rows, one for each variety, or make shorter furrows across the width of the tray, one for each type of onion. Because most of us handle far fewer seeds than someone who plants on an agricultural scale, we can take our time and sow less thickly.
“If you can space them at about four seeds per inch,” Tipping said, “then you can really get transplants the diameter of a pencil.” Rarely do you get more than a few such robust seedlings in mail-order packages.
Transplant in clusters
The final destination of the seedlings is a sunny location in fertile, well-drained soil.
“We spread about a half-inch to an inch of compost on all the onion beds,” Tipping said. “Because they feed inefficiently, they need the fertility right there to get to a good size.” (If you wish, he said, you can substitute organic fertilizer for the compost; apply it at the rate recommended on the package.)
At the time of transplanting, another decision comes into play that affects the size of the bulb.
Some varieties Mr. Tipping grows, such as the heirloom Ailsa Craig and his Siskiyou Sweet, can reach up to a pound each, or sometimes more than two pounds. But “who wants or needs a two-pound onion, or even a one-pound one?” he said. “Our goal is to get half-pound bulbs.”
A tactic he learned from Eliot Coleman, the influential Maine author and organic farmer, steers seedlings in that direction. Instead of planting each one individually, he picks a few at a time from the ground and plants them “in small groups, two or three per hole.”
As for depth, “simply place the white part underground; that’s a good telltale mark,” she said, referring to the place where the roots and future bulb meet the green of the leaves.
Mr Tipping also grows leeks (Allium porrum) in open flats. But they take longer than onions to reach the transplant stage, perhaps 10 to 12 weeks. With leeks he avoids planting in bunches. At transplant time, he makes six-inch-deep furrows, like small trenches, spacing an individual seedling every 10 or 12 inches within them.
“We plant them at the bottom of the furrow, leaving the furrows to pile up the plants at the first moment of weeding,” he said. Such hilling promotes leeks with longer white legs. Older varieties, such as Ester Cook and Falltime, are among Mr Tipping's favourites.
On the farm, leave a foot between Allium rows to allow for easy weeding with the six-inch blade of a hoe. In the backyard, where you are more likely to weed by hand, each bunch of onions can be planted on a grid eight or 10 inches in each direction.
Weeding, Tipping noted, is something the onions will require. In Siskiyou, they are weeded three times a season. Just look at their structure, he said: Unlike, say, a lettuce seedling, which forms a rosette of shading leaves and basically covers the ground around the plant, upright onions don't have that built-in way of competing with weeds.
“You can grow weeds or onions, but you can't grow both,” he said, crediting Warren Weber, considered the godfather of organic farming in California, with the critical reminder that it will be up to the gardener or farmer. to give the onions the benefit they need.
One more tip: Think “harvest sequentially,” Tipping said. Don't wait to enjoy your onions until all the bulbs have reached full size and the tips have begun to turn yellow and fall off, indicating they are ready, especially if you are growing the sweet Spanish varieties.
Try to harvest some when the tips are still green, in the case of so-called chives, whose immature bulbs tend to have a more delicate flavor. The tops are an excellent substitute for chives. Or maybe make onion leaf pesto, he suggested.
Either way, you can claim credit for the main ingredient, from seed to table.
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast. A path to the gardenand a book of the same name.
To receive weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here.
