My sweet onions split during growth and I’m not sure why. I’ve grown onions for years now! As usual, I purchased 100 onion sets from my local seed store and planted them as I normally do. Yes, 100 onions is quite a bit for the home garden, especially considering they all tend to mature at the same time, but I haven’t conquered the art of starting onions from seed, so I’m at the mercy of my local merchant. But I’m not complaining! Without her, I wouldn’t have any onions in my garden.
Besides, sweet onions freeze well and lend themselves to most any meal–scrambled eggs, lunch sandwich or salad, dinner sauté or soup. And they’re easy to grow. I’ve grown both sweet onions (Vidalia style) and red onions. However, I’ve never had so many split onions as I do this year. Any ideas why?
Too much phosphorous? Mushroom compost? As a gardener, you try to give your plants what they need, but sometimes we can get carried away. Perhaps this crop was given too much of a good thing? Not sure. It’s not a horrible problem, considering they still taste good. But still. I’m curious.
As an aside, I occasionally discover that a red onion slipped into the original clump. Perfect. I love red onions!
For the basics on growing onions, visit my How-To Grow Sweet Onions section of this website. Homegrown sweet onions are super sweet and delicious.
We grew our “short day” sweet onions from seed (started in fall, transplanted to garden when cool weather arrived), and some of them split in my Zone 9A Florida garden this year too. Perhaps it’s the weather?
The Dixondale Farms onion folks attribute uneven watering (or in our case, maybe long periods of drought), and temperature fluxuations (like those late freezes we had) as some of the likely causes of onions doubling / splitting.
?????
I’m not complaining…we’re enjoying an early and awesome sweet onion harvest this year! We had soup again tonight (with our home-grown sweet onions, celery, carrots, green beans, cabbage, tomatoes, basil, marjoram, bay leaves, etc.).
Yummy, yummy, the spring garden provides!
We are well fed and grateful for the bountiful harvest…as is the opossum I can hear munching under the peach trees outside my window right now….stuffing him or herself with as much as he/she can consume before dawn (or before the bully raccoons arrive shortly. The gluttonous, selfish, wasteful raccoons sometimes bite (and ruin for us) scores of peaches in their pursuit of the sweetest fruits, then gorge themselves on the “perfect” and most ripe peaches until they puke, then eat some more….like the romans).
Hopefully furry Caligula and cohorts leave a few un-bitten peaches for us after tonight’s garden orgy.
So far there’s been enough fruit for all of us – nocturnal and diurnal creatures alike – but the poor peach trees are really taking a beating – branches breaking nightly due to weight of foraging and feasting wildlife clinging to the already fruit-burdened branches.
I’ll have a lot of pruning to do as soon as we get some dry days again – hopefully soon – before the bacterial and fungal pathogens get too far along.
Thanks again for sharing your garden observations and experiences with the rest of us…who likewise are observing some unusual phenological and harvest anomalies this year. It’s comforting (and interesting) to know “we’re not alone” (in the thoughts, observations, conundrums, and questions we ponder in our gardens).
Thanks for the GREAT information! All of the above could have happened to my onions–irregular water, temperature, etc. Stay vigilant 🙂