Harvest a Summer Meal
[music] in today's video we will see how to grow onionsin whisky barrels so onions can be planted in winter for a harvestin late spring or summer depending on the weather in your area now i will not be going over the plantingdetails for onions as they are the same as garlic, which i just explained in my previousvideo there are many ways to grow onions you can either use onion seeds that you canbuy from any garden center and then you can sow these onion seeds andthen transplant them when they are ready into
bigger containers or you can use onion sets which are basicallysmall onions that you can start in containers to get biggeronions the onions that you see here have been startedfrom seed and then transplanted into this bigger container now onions use the same kind of soil thatgarlic uses nice and loose, with lots of compost but onions do grow bigger bulbs so they do need fertilizer as opposed to garlicwhich can grow pretty much with no fertilizers
added use a nice balanced fertilizer for your onions the general rule to determine whether youronions are ready for harvest is when the tops start falling off as you can see here so what you should do is once the tops startfalling off, just make sure you break the tops of all the other onions now what this does is it signals dormancy what it means is that now plants stop formingthe greens and continue to form the bulbs and go intodormancy
this is the general life cycle of an onion it first produces a lot of greens and then the plant concentrates its energyon producing the bulbs so it takes about 1-2 weeks for the dormancyto trigger in and for these 1-2 weeks, you just have towait patiently for the dormancy to set in and then get ready for harvest so when you are harvesting the onions all you need to do is just uproot them
and just lay them by the side and this first step let's them dry a littlebit before you actually start the drying and curingprocess and don't worry, some of the bulbs will besmaller than the others that's just the way onions grow and i'll tell you a neat tip that you canuse to something with your bulbs that are smaller and i'll give you that tip towards the endof the video so do not wash the onions after harvestingbecause you need them to be very dry before
you start curing them so leave them on a sunny spot or maybe a partiallysunny spot like a window sill or something like that and let them cure it takes about 2 weeks for them to dry completely so once the drying process has completed,you will notice that almost all the leaves have turned completelybrown and then what you need to do is just cut offthe extra roots and the tops and just do that for all the onions that youhave
so here we go, that's our harvest nice big onion bulbs that you can store forweeks to come and for the onion bulbs that did not grow,you can use them as sets for your next season so i hope you liked this video and planting onions in whisky barrels letsyou grow a few onions and if you want to grow more, you can justuse multiple whisky barrels or grow them in raised beds with the same techniques and if you have any tips for growing onions,please do leave your comments and feedback i would love to know from you what you havein your mind
what you do to grow great onions in your garden and i'll see you again soon in another episodeof california gardening until then...happy gardening!
