Whats' wrong with my ONIONS?

There’s something deeply satisfying about harvesting your own big, bulbous onions. They’re generally an easy, trouble-free crop to grow, so when something goes wrong, it can leave you scratching your head.

If you’ve grown a crop that produced lots of leaves but no bulbs, it could be because they were planted at the wrong time of year. Onions are a cool-season crop, so they are best sown and planted from autumn to early winter in most areas, or autumn to early spring in cold southern areas. They also ‘bulb up’ in response to lengthening daylight hours. Timing is everything. A punnet from the nursery planted out in late spring to early summer may not form bulbs for 12 months, if at all.

It’s important to grow varieties that suit your area. With long summer days, southern growers have lots of choices; in northern areas, summer days are shorter, so go for ‘short day’ varieties, such as Gladalan.

Sunshine is important, too. Onions like plenty, and if they don’t get enough, growth can almost come to a standstill. Adequate sunshine can be hard to find in the backyard patch in winter, with those short days and long shadows. I reserve the sunniest spots for onions and garlic, and give less sunny spots to cool-season crops that can handle it, such as brassicas and leafy greens.

Then there’s drainage. A few wet weeks in winter can really set back an onion crop, especially with clay soils. Their roots hate being cold and wet, and rot easily in these conditions. Once that happens, the onions will sit there looking sad and miserable, and they may give up completely.

If your soil is heavy, either mound it up or grow your onions in raised beds. If it’s still too wet after rain, remove the mulch, thin out the crop to get more sun onto the soil, and open up the soil between rows with a garden fork to help it dry out.