The Onion Family: My Garden is always full of Onions and their Relatives

It’s easy to grow a lot of them in wide rows. And their flavors— from the strong yellow keeping onions to the subtle shallots—go with almost everything. How can you cook without them?

Onions, garlic, and shallots will store for many months, and you don’t need a root cellar either. Leeks won’t hold out like the others but they can be kept in my “perennial patch” in the garden or for a week or two in the refrigerator. The onion family is with us 12 months a year. Jan and I never have to buy any.

There are lots of fun ways to grow these crops in the garden. How about a multiplying shallot patch so you never have to buy expensive shallots again? Or a no-work “Eternal Yield” square of bunching onions to get the earliest scallions every spring? Or a big row of giant sweet onions?

The taller the top, the bigger the onion

There are only a couple of important things to remember about growing plenty of good onions.

Start early in the season, well before the last spring frost date. There are two reasons to get going early: the cold won’t hurt onions, and they need as much time as possible to grow big, lush green tops. The more top growth your onions produce, the bigger the bulbs they will form on the bottom. But how do bulbs grow? Where do they get their energy to fatten up? Here’s the story:

After onions have been growing a while, they suddenly stop putting energy into their tops when Mother Nature gives them a signal, or “trips” them. This signal is a combination of increasing temperature and the number of hours a day the sun shines. It’s complicated, but the point is that suddenly the onions shift gears and the energy from the leaves is transported down to make a bulb. If you have a healthy onion plant with a lot of green tops, you should get a good-sized bulb. If you plant late, the onions may be short on top growth, which means smaller bulbs.

Up to 10 times more onions in wide row

Plant onions according to my wide row method and you’ll be harvesting onions sooner, with a steady harvest through the growing season, and have plenty of big ones left to store for the cold months.

In my wide row trials, I found that you can get up to 10 times the harvest of a single row by devoting an equal amount of garden space to a wide row planting. I’ve often thought I could get rich planting onions in wide rows on just a little bit of land if I could only find some way to sell them all.

For a wide row super harvest

Let’s look at how I grow a wide row of onions to see how such a big harvest is possible. Most of this information also applies to the other onion family members.

Whether you plant seeds, “sets” (little onions which grow up to be big onions), or small onion transplants, the wide row harvest should be far ahead of standard single row plantings.

Close planting. I plant onion sets about 2 or 3 inches from each other in all directions. They’re almost shoulder to shoulder! Don’t be afraid to crowd them. I’ve even planted sets as close as 1 inch apart. Hold each set by the point end (this puts the root end in the right direction) and press it firmly in the ground to its full depth. Use a hoe to tamp them down or the bulbs may pop out of the ground.

In-Row Weeder keeps row clean. Early in the season, pass over the onion row each week with the In-Row Weeder to keep weeds in check without ever bending down. If one or two weeds survive, let them get big enough to pull easily a little later on.

Pull some early scallions. When onion tops are 6 or 8 inches tall and the stems are as thick as a pencil, pull onions as you need them. This thins the row and helps keep the soil loose near the other onions. In many wide rows I harvest two out of three onions for early eating. The first scallions have not yet formed a bulb, but later, if the plants have small bulbs, Jan uses them for pickling.

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