How to Grow Onions in Your Backyard

Learn some old-time hints on having a great supply of home-grown onions from your victory garden.

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Onion Growing - A successful gardener writes: Let me say to those who, by reason of repeated failures, have become discouraged, and abandoned the growing of onions, that if they will put the following directions in practice they will be astonished at the result. One of the most important and first considerations is the soil, for it is of no more use to try on unsuitable soil that it is to "spit against the wind," and if you attempt it you will only "get your labor for your pains." The soil must be clean, rich, and light, not a gravelly kind, or one so dry as to suffer from drouth sandy loam is the best. The sowing should be done in April, and as early in the month as possible; "delay is dangerous." With a heavy roller, or the feet, or in some way, the ground in which the seeds lie should be pressed down quite hard. Weeding should be attended to as soon as you can safely do so. The tops should be left on the bed or field to rot, or to spade or plow in; and onions improve by being grown on the same ground year after year.

A New Method of Raising Onions -A new method of onion-growing is strongly recommended by a French horticulturist. Some of the seedlings in the original bed should be left standing at intervals of about a couple of inches, and the spaces between them caused by the removal of the rest, filled in with good garden mold mixed with guano. The beds must be kept well watered, and it is said the resulting crop will astonish the grower.

Bending Down Onions - Many old truck farmers have caused surprise to lookers-on at their work, to see them bending over their onion tops. The time to do this is when some begin to show signs of flowering. The method is thus explained: "This operation may be done by the hand, but time is saved by two persons each holding one of the ends of a pole in such a manner as to strike the stems an inch or two above the bulbs. This is called `laying over,' and is of great benefit to all crops of onions, as the growth of the stems is thereby much checked, and the whole nourishment thrown into the bulbs. It is an old practice in family gardens, and has never failed to give satisfactory results.

From THE NATIONAL FARMER'S AND HOUSEKEEPER'S CYCLOPAEDIA, 1888

This is part of an article from the book The Kitchen Garden Guide