Week 14 - Onion Harvest

For episode/article 14 for This Week in the Garden, we’re harvesting onions. Growing onions was one of my first experiments with this garden and in this edition, I’ll show you when and how to harvest them, how to dry them and store them, and my experience growing onions.

Onions don’t have to reach maturity to be harvested and eaten. If you’d like, you can periodically pick onions throughout the season as spring onions and eat the greens as chives. I chose to let the onions sit in the ground longer and while I was on vacation, they matured. The easiest way to tell your onions are ready to pick is if the top foliage has fallen over. This usually doesn’t happen all at once, but you can push the tops over once about half of your plants have matured so that your harvest will be ready all at once. I did this with my onions and I let them sit in the ground for a few days to allow the tops to dry. If there’s rain or cool weather in the forecast, you’ll want to pull them up to prevent rotting.

The easiest way to harvest the onions is to gently pull them where the foliage meets the bulb. About 90% of my onions came up this way with no problem. Some of the more mature onions ripped and I had to go back with a trowel to dip up the bulbs. Be cautious when doing this as the trowels can damage the skins of the onions. If that happens, make sure to set those onions aside and eat them within a few days as they won’t store. Before drying and storage, check over the onions for insect damage and soft spots. These onions won’t store either, so either compost them or if the damage is minute, eat them!

After you’ve dug your onions you’ll need to dry them for storage. You can do this outside in an area that doesn’t get direct sunlight, just make sure to keep the moisture off of them. I didn’t have an area like that in my yard, so I dried them in my garage. I made sure to spread out the bulbs so there was airflow, and I left the garage door open to reduce the humidity. With warm dry weather, the tops and roots should dry down in about a week.

After a week or so of drying you’ll want to cut off the dried foliage and roots. Scissors or shears work well, just be careful not to pierce the onion. I left a small section of the stem where the foliage meets the bulb to allow that section to finish drying. The goal should be to get the onions as dry as possible to reduce the chances of disease and rotting. To achieve that, I left the onions an additional week after removing the foliage/roots.

Once the onions are completely dry they’re ready to be stored. It’s best to bag onions to allow airflow. This can be done either with a mesh bag or in pantihose. Once bagged, store them in a cool dry place. Make sure you don’t wash your onions before storage as the additional moisture will promote bacterial and fungal growth. It’s ok if your onions have a little dirt!

Overall, my first experience with onions went well. They’re one of the first vegetables to go in the ground in the spring and require little maintenance. In order to get larger onions I added fertilizer periodically throughout the season, but other than that I left them alone. One issue I had was weed control. Onions don’t have much foliage to shade out weeds, so the onion weed got overrun quickly. It’s important to be careful weeding around onions because they become uncovered easily. This only happened once or twice though, and the rest of the experience went well.

I hope this episode encourages you to experiment in your garden and gets you curious about growing onions. If you’ve got any questions or comments, send me an email or fill out our form. That’s all for this article from This Week in the Garden, stay tuned until next time.

-Adam