Onion day
I feel a bit like a kid
who swears the dog ate her homework when year after year I have to
report trials and tribulations with our bulb onions.
Unfortunately, this year is no different.
The problems began on
February 1 when I
started onion seeds
saved from last year in the same plastic flats I've been using for
seven years now. Even though my germination
test said the onion seeds were pretty good, not very many came up,
and most of those that did sprout soon damped off.
I think the problem was
partially due to fungi hanging out in the plastic flat, but it was
exacerbated by old, unvigorous seeds and by cold weather that prevented
me from putting the flats outside to enjoy the sunshine. Cool,
damp, dark conditions were perfect for the damping-off fungus to
colonize weakened seedlings, but I was able to get another set of seeds
going by putting newly-bought seeds in a pot instead of in the
problematic flats.
I had been concerned
that a pot of onion seedlings would be trouble to transplant, and I did
have to gently tease each seedling apart, doubling my transplant
time. I don't mind the extra minutes, though, as long as these
guys take.
Since I'd been counting
on the old seeds germinating, I only bought
half as many new seeds as I needed, so I was only able to plant seven
beds (the same number as last year) instead of the fourteen beds I'd
hoped
would take us through the year without storebought onions. Which
is
all a long way of saying --- I need all of the seedlings I set out
Monday to
survive!
I think next year I may
hedge my bets by planting a bed of onion seeds close together under a
quick hoop the same way I do broccoli
and cabbage.
Planting directly into the ground avoids so many problems
with indoor seed-starting, with the only minor
inconvenience being that you have to wait on the weather. But
I'll also try to disinfect my flats and will plan to buy new onion
seeds every year, which might also solve the problem. Maybe 2014
will finally be the year of the onion?
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
Hi Anna - Never having started onions from seed before, you'll have to forgive me... Why not start each of your onion seeds (and any seed, for that matter) in a tiny biodegradable pot? I teach gardening to a bunch of kinders and 1st graders, and we just made little seed starting pots using newspaper - we're sprouting sunflowers and pumpkins. I figure in the few weeks that they take to sprout and get a few sets of real leaves, the newspaper will be pretty mushy, and will disintegrate pretty quickly when we plant into the ground. You'd be able to get a headstart on your onion seeds, and perhaps transplanting into the ground would be easier?
Mitsy --- I remember you mentioning the hydrogen peroxide treatment. I'm just so darn leery of anything remotely chemical, and that hits my not-organic-enough buttons.
I figure the better solution is to tweak my method so the damping-off fungi are outcompeted by happy fungi, which always seemed to be the case until this year. I may get desperate enough to try it eventually, though....
Rena --- I've never had good luck with newspaper pots. We used those for tomatoes our first year, and the newspaper didn't really break down in the soil quickly, resulting in unhappy seedlings after transplant. (We also don't subscribe to the newspaper, so we'd have to hunt them down if we wanted to make pots out of them.)
Damping off is the worst!!! I have heard that a chamomile spray helps to prevent the fungal disease.
And as Murphy's Law goes- my chamomile seedlings have become infected... thus far I've lost about half of my plants... my condolences on the loss of your onions