Starting Onions - 92 Million Miles From the Sun

     It's mid-February and while the daylight situation is improving, it is still total bullshit. I'm at about 42.6°N, which means that today we have around 10.5 hours of "daylight," but since this is winter in New York that daylight is filtered through a nearly ever-present gray cloak that renders everything a pallid shadow, myself included. 

    The sun is about 92 million miles away right now. That's pretty close in terms of both our own specific elliptical orbit and the general distance to just about anything else in the universe, but it is also a distance so great that it can't really be internalized by anyone. Ninety-two million miles isn't something you can close your eyes and experience second-hand, like a long drive to a grandparent's house, but in the winter, when it's dark when I head to work and dark when I leave, I think I can get a little closer to understanding that distance.

    For no reason I can conjure, the loss of light in October and November is easier to handle than the slow return in February and March. I don't think it was always like this (for me, I'm not suggesting that the daylight situation has appreciably changed in probably 4.5 billion years, though we're drifting 1.5 cm away every year). As a kid, I loved winter. Maybe winters were better back then or maybe it was early bedtimes, meaning I didn't hang out in the dark as much? Maybe it's that now I work outdoors most of the year, usually into December, and the short days combined with getting plunged back into my apartment/office until March gang up on me? Whatever the reason, I don't handle these months as well as I used to, but one thing that helps is starting onions.

    Onions are also sensitive to daylight hours, so in a way, they're my kindred spirits. Onions are divided into long, short, and intermediate-day varieties based on the number of hours of daylight required for them to start the bulbing process. I'm in long-day onion territory, which is one of the few things that make these limited hours of daylight an asset. Long-day onions won't start sizing up until there are 14-16 hours of daylight - mine are typically ready for harvest as the light begins to fade again in late summer. All of those days and months before their daylight threshold is reached means more development of the tops, and bigger bulbs at harvest.

      There are three basic ways to grow onions: sets, starts, and seeds:

• Sets are the easiest; They're cheap and widely available at hardware stores and garden centers, but are more prone to bolting, you'll likely get smaller onions, and your choice of varieties is limited. Sets are tiny, immature onions, not true seeds, and because onions are biennial - meaning they set bulbs and roots in the first year and aim to produce seeds in the second - their natural inclination is to set seed, reducing your potential yield and storage capability. Anyone who has seen a stalk come up from an onion in their cabinet knows it doesn't have a lot of time left -  that outcome is essentially the end goal of an onion set.
• Starts can be ordered from many seed companies, though Dixondale Farms might be your best bet, both in selection and bang for your buck. What you get is a bunch of onion seedlings grown by professionals and then dried out into dormancy for shipping. Regardless of when you order, they'll arrive at a time specifically suited to your climate (here is mid-April), and all you have to do is plant them out. They're superior to sets in variety and storage quality, and will size up better, though they're likely more expensive. A bag of 50 sets might cost $3 and a bunch of 50 plants could be $20 with shipping, but the math evens out if you consider the harvest potential of each purchase. The economy of scale from a place like Dixondale is also hard to compete with. If you only want a few onions, a bag of sets from Tractor Supply might be fine, but if you want to grow 2,000 onions, you have to go with starts or seed your own (if you have the space).
• The main advantages of starting your own onion seeds are that you have an even

  

  onions two weeks after sowing - new seed on right, one-year-old seed on left

  
  greater choice of variety than with starts, and that when setting out you are transplanting healthy, growing, seedlings, rather than dormant, shipped starts, that may take a week or more to revitalize, re-root, and start to grow again. A drawback, depending on your perspective, is that you have to do the work of growing them. Onions seeds require more than just a sunny window. Artificial light (a dedicated grow light or even just a florescent shop light) is required for vigorous seedlings if you don't have a greenhouse. On the other side, they don't take up a lot of room - unless you are planning on growing 2,000. If that's the case then please leave this page and start a search for 'growing onions for market cooperative extension'. The other main disadvantage is that onions have the shortest shelf-life of any vegetable seed and you should reorder them every season. The economy of seeds versus whole plants also gets more muddled when you factor in energy for grow lights and your own time input, but in the gray cloak of winter, I consider those things to be perks instead of costs.

There's a couple of ways (there's more than two ways but I'm only barely qualified to talk about these two) to start onions from seed. The first is to simply start a gillion seeds in a flat/pot/whatever and when they're ready, either prick single seedlings out or remove them in bulk and dunk the roots in water to make it easy to separate them, then plant out individually at a spacing of about 4". This method is great if you don't have a ton of space to raise your seedlings, as literally hundreds of onions could be started in a single pot. The second way, shown in the picture above, is to sow around five seeds per cell in standard 4 or 6-cell trays, and then thin down to three plants once the seedlings are a few inches tall or have developed a second leaf. This way takes up more space but the roots of the onions will be less disturbed during transplanting. You'll space these out further than singles, probably 6 or 8 inches, but the yield per foot will be higher. In either case, you can trim the onion tops at 5" or so to keep them comfortably under your lights and/or you can move them outside during the day when it is sunny and the temperature is above 45°F or so. The latter strategy spares your electrical bill a little, but it's also nice to just go outside and stand in the sun for a bit.

some of last year's onions curing

Starting seedlings is an investment. Some, like lettuce, pay off quickly. Others, like onions, require time and energy over months and in a period when you wouldn't usually be using either. You could buy them from a store and forgive yourself most of that work, but part of what makes starting your own seeds so great is that you can lean into the routine and let that carry you through the dark months and into the summer. Onions are the first thing you can start. Watching them germinate, grow, watering, trimming, running your hands over them and smelling, and just sitting in front of the grow lights for five minutes here and there, are reminders that you and the onions are working together to see the daylight, the warmth, the humidity, and the enveloping oneness with nature that comes with summer, and that all of that will come soon enough. Starting onions is a promise to yourself that there is a future. It is about looking forward even though the sky presses down and asks that you focus only on the gray, beige, and brown landscape, or your snowed in car, or a biting wind. Those minutes under the lights are a reminder of reds and yellows and greens, and of the summer to come, even as we drift ever so slightly further away from the sun.

updated 2.11.21