 onions. Onions are a very popular crop in the garden but it can get a little confusing like do I plant long day or short day onions? Do I use bulbs or sets or seeds? It can get just plants like plants. Okay, everybody's got their own way to do it and we've got Harleen here tonight to talk to our high value crop specialist for NDSU and she'll give us all the answers on how to make the most out of our Allianz. So let's welcome Harleen. Well, I'm not expecting you guys to have a field of onions but there are some growers in North Dakota that do have field of onions and there's a lot of times that just for that we're all on the same page. Basically an onion is a biennial. So what does that mean? It flowers the second year. It needs two years to complete its life cycle. And a lot of times people don't realize that each one of these circles that was a leaf and so it's the swollen part of the leaf base and up above is when you saw the green part of that circular leaf. Axillary buds form at the base down here. Hollow leaves, of course, most of the time what's the difference between onion and garlic or chives is, you know, onion are more circular. Your garlic is more flattened but they're both hollow leaves. And so the thing that we're really going to talk about though is onion bulb size. And what does it take to go and get a large three or four inch diameter onion? Anyone know? Variety? Yeah. Well, when you, your bulb, whatever size your plant is when it starts bulbing will determine how big that bulb can get in diameter. So if you have a little free leaf plant and we and we have a long day and it triggered bulbing, then you're going to get a very small bulb because it just didn't have enough food reserves to go and initiate that big bulb. So I always tell people to go and get a large onion. You have to have them out there as early as possible. That will be the best. But we'll also go in and talk about what, if it's better to have a go from a transplant, a set or seed. And a lot of people don't believe we can even get a four inch diameter onion from seed in North Dakota, but it's very, it's very possible. A lot of it also has to do with how closely you plant them together. If you want little green onions, you'll plant them really thick and the competition will keep them small. If you want to have a four inch diameter onion, you better not have another onion plant two inches away from it because they like to be together, but they don't like to be together that much. Okay. So a little bit of information, information of storage organs in response to photo period. So I did say onions, the ones we grow here a long day, but there's a lot of different onions. There's short days, there's intermediate days. Now when we look at day neutrals, we don't have day-neutral onions, but carrots, beets, turnips and radishes are day-neutral. They begin to go in that modified stem or a lot of times it's a modified stem that elongates or enlarges. So these don't have a certain day length that triggers that. Short days or long days, short nights are onions and garlic most of the time, even when we have what we call short day onions, that's about 12 to 14 hours of day length, which if you think about it isn't quite that short for day length. Short days, it went long nights to go and have those tubers form sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, yams and cassavas. So a lot of different plants go and respond to day length differently. We also have different onion types, the American or the pungent globe shaped ones. You have your European, which are the Bermuda and Spanish types. The Spanish are usually rather mild, but not as mild as the Bermuda. These a lot of times they'll call these the short day ones. The milder they are, a lot of times the less long. New vocabulary there, the shorter period that you can keep them in storage. Your long day pungent ones store very nicely for a long period of time. What we see is that there's more and more going to the hybrids, first of all, they're more vigorous, they're uniform, and a lot of times if they're adapted to that area they'll get larger. Okay, yeah, we have all different colors, mild to pungent, all different shapes. A lot of times you can affect though your shape of your onion by how deep you plant it, or transplant it. So if I went and I transplanted my set more than like a half inch deep, buried it, what shape do you think it would be versus if I transplanted it really close to the surface of the soil? The deeper, the more oblong it's going to get within regions. Yeah, I mean, there's some onions that are just, you know, that was the genetic makeup of them, but you can go in something that's going to be round by transplanting it deeper, it'll get more oblong. Likewise, if you don't transplant it as deep as it's supposed to be, it'll get flatter. But a lot of times that's going to get flatter. But a lot of times that's down to genetics. Okay, so here, 12, 13 for short days, day neutrals, long days. And I'll go and talk a little bit later about where we are in latitude in the United States and how photo period is really important. You know, a lot of times your sweet ones, they said are shorter days. And so to go and, you know, to have a large enough plant by the time we get those 12 to 13 hours, what some of the growers try to do, and what they do in milder climates is they plant them in the fall. That way, they're big enough by the time they get that photo period to trigger them for balding that they get sizable. Well, the problem here in North Dakota is if we had consistent snow cover, when we get our cold temperatures, we could probably get away with that. But this last year, if you would have planted these in the fall and had your little plants, and we didn't get any snow and got some really cold temperatures, they'd probably all be dead. And you put a lot of effort and energy into something that's not going to make it. So a lot of times what we do is then we'll just go with the long day ones. So what should we do? Should we go with seeds or sets? You can see how with the sets versus the seeds, your plants are going to be further ahead if you put them in the ground at the same time. That's because you've already, with that set, you've already started those plants, but there's some problems with that on whether or not, if they're three quarters of an inch in diameter and they receive some cold temperatures, they may be far enough past the juvenility stage where that might promote flowering. So you never want to go and get a set that's more than three quarters of an inch in diameter. More likely to have, you know, the grower of these sets are going to be putting them in a cooler because they're growing them and then they're waiting to go and ship them up north for us to go and plant. And the best way, you know, the cooler the temperature, the longer you can store them. But that's also can go and vernalize them and then make them think that they had already gone through one year and will flower on you. And any kind of onion that's going to flower, you're not going to get a very large bulb. So you don't want them to flower. Okay. A lot of times when we do plant, we go and put them in double rows, things like that, it's much easier. They'll be about four inches apart. They should be four inches apart. And then it's on a stagger system so that they grow very slowly and so they're very slow to emerge. And just having them close together really helps with that. But again, you want them four inches apart so that when that they're touching, but not pushing against each other and causing problems with the shape of the bulb. As early as possible, you can see seed germinates as low as 35. It's best at 75. That's optimum. But it'll start, it can really take some cool temperatures. We find that transplants definitely give us a jump, of course, what you need with transplants. And we've done this in the green area. We've done this in the greenhouse where we've gone in plug trays, just went and planted the seeds. But you need to make sure you do this eight to nine weeks before you intend to transplant them. There are companies that you can go and not necessarily that they're USDA organic, but there are companies that will just go and sell these transplants. Basically they harvest them. This is done in Arizona and Georgia where usually you have warmer weather right now in Arizona. I'm not sure Georgia is that much warmer. And then they'll cut off the roots a lot of times and the tops will leave that much. And then you can just, you get them in bundles of 25 and you just stick away. And most of these are hybrids. I started myself too. And so once I have here, avoid vernalization. Again, if you get them out, you have that opportunity to get them out there too early and say, well, we had that 70 degree weekend and we had 50-some degree weather and things are really nice for a week. And then all of a sudden it got colder again. Well, they could have been growing and when you have a lot of fluctuation, the hot and then cold, that will vernalize and then they will think they need to flower that year. But generally you shouldn't have as much problem with that as you would with sets that are larger. Here I say always use less than a half inch and you don't have to worry. If you do get those larger ones, use them for green onions. So be up and ready in no time because that means three to four weeks earlier than seed. A lot of these are also open pollinated and so they tend not to get as large as your hybrid. I talked about spacing, weed control. I swear the onion is probably the least competitive plant I know. It never shade out. It has a very shallow root system and so needs good water. You can see one week during the seedling stage, inch and a half in the bulbing stage. And then you should go and keep that up until they start to fall over. And what that means is when you see those tops start to curl up, fall over, cut the water off on that. Also with fertility and fertilizing, you never want to go and go past probably the end of June and you don't want to give it too much at one time because you'll end up with the thicker necks and those don't store well at all. So what I've kind of talked about what I'm going to talk about is the soil control is bulbing. You can see here, okay, let me give this a case. Here we are in North Dakota. Latitude, we're way up at 45. Usually for long days it's somewhere around 36 or higher. Short day onions are down below 35 and so you can see a lot of times Texas is where you get in Georgia where you get a lot of your short day onions because they can go and actually they don't have those kind of winters. They can plant them in the fall. When they get 12 to 13 hours, their plants are big enough. They're at that six leaf stage and they'll make nice sized short day onions. We can't do that. When do you think we get 14 hours of day length? Cheating. Oh, let me look. Okay. Now, what's the longest day of the year? June 21st. Well, as you can see here, we actually get into about 14 days of day length. 14 hours, 14 days. Sorry, 14 hours. Well, this says, okay, so from sunset to sunrise, you know, here it says we're in that before June. To get to 16, it's in mid June by the time we get to 16. And we don't get much in Fargo and like that, we don't get much above 16 hours of day length. So if a long day onion starts to get into its balbing stage at 14 to 16 hours, look at, we're talking somewhere in the first part of May. So if we don't have those plants pretty big by that time and they start balbing, well, that's why you end up with these little onions like this is they just didn't have enough food reserve built in so that when they started to bulb, they could actually end up with a large diameter onion. And so that's why I always say, as soon as possible, because there are cool seeds in plant, you don't have to worry generally. I had a grower with seed. The one year he was out there, he was probably the first part of April. And of course, then he called a couple weeks later and he says, I see ice crystals in my soil. Do I have to be worried? And I said, well, depends on how large they are, how much they've actually germinated, but onion as seeds germinate very slowly and didn't have any problem with that. I'm not saying that's always going to happen, but if you're going to go with sets or transplants, you can wait past April. By that, you know, transplants, you already have a four leaf plant. With sets, you end up, it puts out two leaves right away. So and that happens within maybe a week or shorter. So, you know, by going with sets or transplants, you're sure to go and have large onions as long as you go and don't over for the life and you give them plenty of water. Here's another way of looking at that. And so you can see, you know, so we have, well, this is just the, this is dusk and dawn in the blue and red, which that showed and then this is your photo period. So day length over time. This is January through December. Of course, we always fall back and spring forward. And so you can see just where, you know, so one, two, three, four, that'd be eight, almost nine hours. Well, I'll do it this way. Almost nine hours in the winter of sunlight. You can see how you get up to almost 16 hours right there. If we're up further, we go north. What happens? More light we get, but more abruptness as far as the change. And so, and the shorter the growing season. So it's important to go and understand that, you know, with onion, it's temperature and day length. And so, which goes and controls balding and the size of your plant, your seedling. When it starts balding, we'll go and determine how large it will get. Lastly, the only other problem that could happen is if they flower. And so anytime you get these plants beyond those five leaves, they're considered beyond that juvenile stage. And so then, if those were transplants or sets, we had warm weather, then we got that cold weather that vernalizes, depending on if it's how long of a period of time. And it will trigger them to thinking they're into flowering stage. So here's where I talked about that. And, you know, they're smaller and they don't store as well. So anytime you see an onion that starts to flower, you might as well pull it up and use it right away because it's not going to store very long. And it's not going to get any much larger. Anyway, I've had people go and say, do I break them off? Will that help? Yeah, maybe a little. But they're never going to reach. They've changed into growing that bulb, that vegetative part, into flowering. And so once you've gone from forming leaves, which is our bulb, to flowering, you're never going to go and get back to the leaf formation. So with that, let's get to some questions now. We've got a question in Grant County and Harleen Wood about planting winter onions with a greater space make the bulbs grow larger. Winter onions. I'm not sure what they mean by winter onions, but planting, you know, if you went beyond four inches, then there is a physical limitation on how big a bulb. You cannot get an eight-inch diameter bulb. I mean, the genetics are to do that. So four inches is optimum. And going beyond that, you're not going to get that bulb any bigger. The question had to do with winter onions. Are those Egyptian onions? Yeah. Well, the Egyptian onions, they're the ones that have the little bulbules at the top. So, yeah. I'm in here that Egyptian onions are weeds. Can't kill them. You're still talking about there's a physical limitation towards any onion. And so, yeah, you want to give them space, but more than four inches, it seems like you're just wasting your space. How about, can onions take frost? They take frost. Now, I've had a lot of people ask questions about, oh, it's supposed to get really cold tonight and my onions, you know, I think we're going to get some warmer weather and they might bulb up more because they really, towards the end, they really start to go and bulb up the most. And I've had temperatures down to 17 degrees. As long as you don't move them or they aren't dug up, they should be okay. But the key is, is if you get that cold temperature, you have to make sure that they go and warm up on their own or you're going to see damage. And if you've lifted them up to go and dry them, you better get them in because they will not withstand that frost, otherwise. Okay, how about, this person wants to start their seat indoors for transplanning. It's a little late for that. Probably, we go usually about the mid to end of January. Okay, so that's your project. Next year, in general, if you could just give a gardener a date about when's a good time to transplant onions, onion transplants. When's a good time to set them outdoors in the garden? Do you have a general? I would try mid-April if I could. April. And you know, how cold and for how long, what temperature does it actually, when the fertilization occur? Most of the transplants, you're not to that five leaf stage. And with your sex, you know, if you stay at that half inch or smaller, they come out with only two leaves. And so, it's more than, it's unlikely that they're going to go and have that occur. The way from the big sex is a good response. This lady's grandmother always danced over the leaves of the onions before she harvested them. But they never understood why. Could you explain the stepping over onions? Now, I have had people go and ask whether or not, you know, they're laying over the natural process. If you actually bent them over, if you would hasten that process of them ripening and you do not, but... Okay. Does onion bulbs keep enlarging after the tops die? Not after the tops die, but you will have some enlarging after they're half down or half of them are, you know, when that keeps over, they'll still enlarge a little bit. You know, when we talk about the hours and then you had also information about dawn and dusk times. So when we talk about, let's say, 14 to 16 hours, do we include dawn and dusk or not? Well, yes. I would consider that to be day length. I mean, dawn and dusk, it isn't completely, well, so when you would say dawn, would you consider the sun slightly up or is dawn day length when the sun's completely up? So I think when the sun's partly up, you're still getting some sunlight. Okay. How about, what's the best way to dry our onions before storing them for winter? I think you just, you want some heat. I mean, yeah. And so you need to get them cured, whether or not you do that when, you know, you lift them and you don't have those tops completely dry. That's up to you. A lot of times I like to leave those tops on to cure them. We use greenhouse benches. Just need some heat. How about, how deep should you plant an onion set? Probably about a half inch. Someone writes, I always thought I was doing something wrong when my onions don't keep and they have big stems. When it sounds like I'm more at the mercy of the temperature, the mother nature passes out. They have big thick necks. What usually happens is you get vitritus. And so then they don't keep very well at all. And so a lot of times what happens is that they get too much fertilizer, especially late in the season and it causes the thickening of the necks. Now you talked about big bulbs. Is Elsa Craig the variety to win the county fair? I don't know it. I haven't tried Elsa Craig. Variety. That was my question. Sedona has our most consistent four inch Sedona. And a lot of times we have variety trials down at the Oaks Research Extension Center and that's then put on the website there. How about how many leaves are the transplants ready to go in the garden? What leaf stage are transplants ready to go to the garden? Seeing them as small as three leaves, usually I'd say when that base is a little bit, not quite the diameter of a pencil, they're good enough size. I've seen smaller ones do just fine, but it's very important that, you know, a usually pencil diameter transplant is in great shape. Lastly, when we dry our onions, should we be bunting them or laying them out singly? I would lay them out singly. Makes sense to me. That's it for the onions and that's it for tonight everybody. So thank you everybody.