Some of the batches onions seemed to not get enough fertility to grow as well as they could this year, but the onions in other gardens had surprising issues that seem to have been caused by too much nitrogen in the soil.
0:00 Another year of growing onions
0:44 Multisown clusters
2:17 Varieties
3:20 Disease
3:58 White rot
5:04 Bolting
5:51 Splitting
7:13 Amended compost
8:53 Heavy loss with heavy fertility
10:15 Finding a balance
11:48 Always learning
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26 Comments
I had a similar splitting issue with my outdoor garlic this year also. cloves were appearing where the leaves would split on top of the bulb, I was bewildered .
Needless to say, the crop was bountiful, they were in high nutrient soil and I am based close to the curragh, not a million miles away. aside, no issue with any diseases on my alliums
omg cant belive my onoions look better than bruce's this year,ahahhaha
I have been growing onions from seed for the past 2 years with reasonable success. I always put into compost. This year i added a granular fertilizer as a top dressing (i think a generic 3 3 3) and it didn't have negative results
Perhaps a less hot fertilizer would be beneficial? Alliums are pretty tolerant of crappy soil in my experience; though im also not trying to get beautiful onions for market!
Do they split outside or always in the polytunnel?
Trying to grow onions where there is white rot present is very frustrating, Ive found growing them as much as it is possible in optimal conditions: most notably in full sun and not planting too densely, you can get a decent crop without too many losses
Please continue, thank you so much.
Birdy
I have found growing onions to be tricky (Halloween joke). Advice from Linda Gilkeson has been helpful. She notes “Onion varieties grown at northern latitude form bulbs in response to the long days/short nights in the weeks around June 21 (48 north). To grow good-sized bulbs, onions need to be planted as early as possible so they develop a good root system before they initiate bulbing. Onions planted too late (after mid-May for us) often won’t make proper bulbs at all. The tricky part is that, like chard, onions are biennial plants so can respond to a period of cold spring weather by going to seed in the summer instead of making bulbs. Premature bolting can occur when large onion sets (nickel-sized or larger) or large onion seedlings (the size of a pencil) are planted while the weather is still too cold. When smaller onion sets and seedlings experience cold weather, they are too small to change their developmental pathway so they don’t go to seed after a cold spell, but if planted too early they might not survive at all. “ (From Linda Gilkeson dot ca)
excellent study keep up the good work 😉
How do you go about growing your onions from seed? I have had bad luck with onions from seed so far.
when do you sow? do you start them off inside under lights or is a greenhouse enough? and when do you plant out? your results look fantastic so I would love to know how to get the same results.
Please keep up the great work.
what do you think about jadam practices ?
Hi Bruce, I've been growing nodig onions from seed for 9 years. To me, it looks like you have Allium leaf miner infection, splitting bulbs are a typical symptom. Look for rows of white dots on the leaves from April onwards. I cover my plants with fleece untill May, and I spray 2 times with spinosad.
Really interesting, about that splitting. I would think the addition of the additional nitrogen a good month before planting, would be plenty of time for the water soluble stuff to be broken down and bioavalable. I would expect they wouldn't take up excessive amounts unless the additional nitrogen was a month or so AFTER you planted. It is curious to me. How much different was it for the plants that didnt split in the other garden? Was there a nearby bed that was slightly uphill and allowed nitrogen runoff into the one garden where excessive splitting occurred?
Hi. Bruce. Great harvest there, far better than ours as I’ve previously mentioned I think we were hit with unending rain and warm temps so everything was hit with mildew.
So having read the comments and anecdotal evidence I was quite intrigued as to what might be causing this issue of the splitting bulbs. Having read various papers none of them pointed the finger at nitrogen causing splitting, most said thick necks (presumably from the plant trying to form more leaves) or that the plant was more susceptible to disease or thrips.
Additionally there was commentary on how difficult it is for onions to get all the N they need due to their shallow rooting and how inefficient of a process it is to get N to get into the onion plant, reports were between 50% at best down to 11% at worst which was quite an eye opener.
There’s a comment further down from a guy who throws 30-30-30 about twice and he’s never had any splitting problems so I wonder if it’s more environmental?
Dis a gud oñion, a heavy oñio!
cracked onions probably comes from a standstill in growth due to drought, stress or other growth causes. I can imagine that with no digging.
Very topical video. I spent a few hours yesterday slicing and freezing onions that had bolted. In my region of Australia we had an early heat wave coming out of winterthat I think caused every single onion plant to bolt. Last year I had only 1 or 2 plants bolt. I don't think my region is suited to onions!! Thanks for sharing.
Just throwing this out there as a different perspective…
But outside of fungal concerns, I don't think bolting and splitting or even rotting are true losses. Some are still edible. And of the rest, you've effectively produced the same sellable yield while also producing compost. That's a win in my book.
Clearly some strange results, the normal is not to feed the onions once the start to bulb as the energy to create bulb should come from the leaves.
Understand that too much nitrogen might have been an issue as compost extra nitrogen with other minerals together may have caused that burning look, just a thought!
The green shoots coming from the bottom of the bulb is something I’ve never seen before is it a daylight length issue, I wouldn’t think so!
Hi! Great video. I am wondering though why you didn't let the compost do it's job in the no-dig and also the intensive garden. Put it on in autumn, plant it then or in spring and let the micro-organisms take care of the crop. All the additives seem to throw sand into the eyes of the plants. Of course you know your soil test better then me, but nitrogen isn't something that we should have to add if the quality of the compost is good.
Greetings from the Netherlands!
As always, you have the most valuable information of all the garden youtubers. 🙂
i love oignons, i love étaing ignons i love farming oignons, and you have very nice oignons, thankyou and good job!!!
Thank you for this video 🌱 Did you calculate the yield per area for the Polyculture and Extensive gardens?
No our onions bolted this year due to the weather. It's been a really bad growing year in SW Scotland, which has similar growing conditions to you. It was the weather.
Mother nature doesn't make deformed anything
Good farming 😊
These videos are very informative. It would be great if the knowledge gleaned from these videos would be put in book form. I'd bet they would sell very well on Amazon/Kindle.