📌 Are Fall Onion Sets Easier Than Spring Seeds?
- 🌱 The Seedling Burnout: Starting onions from seed indoors takes months of babying. As disease pressures (like Downy Mildew) get worse every year, some of our veteran growers are ready to ditch the seed trays entirely and switch to overwintering (fall-planted) onion sets.
- 🍂 The Great Fall Debate: In theory, planting sets in October means they wake up two weeks earlier, grow stronger, and beat the late-summer blights. But is it really that foolproof? Spoiler: Our community is fiercely divided.
- 👀 What You’ll Discover Below: While Ludmila swears by the fall planting method, other growers share their disaster stories. Read the discussion to find out why Galina’s store-bought sets randomly split into tiny, useless bulbs, and why heavy spring snowmelt might make overwintering a terrible idea for your specific climate.
- 🌬️ Bonus: The “Lazy” Curing Hack: If you just harvested onions with thick, wet, green necks, don’t scrape or fuss over them! Ludmila accidentally discovered a completely hands-off way to cure them perfectly. Check out her “abandonment” trick in the first post.
Russi wrote:
…and out of the commercial onion seeds, I really liked the white variety ‘Neman’, it sprouted like a forest and the bulbs were the size of my fist.
Something interesting happened with my onions this year. Because I was so completely overwhelmed with the massive harvest of cucumbers, tomatoes, and everything else, I just pulled my onions out of the ground and threw them under the shed overhang with all their green tops still attached. Many of them had thick, wet, green necks. I just abandoned them there.
I checked on them today, and the entire batch dried out beautifully! The tops are completely dry. All I have to do is trim them and bring them in for storage. No need to scrape and fiddle with wet necks like last year.
But now I’m thinking, is it even worth growing onion seedlings from seed anymore? Maybe I should just plant a couple of pounds of onion sets in the fall and call it a day. Well, I’d still grow a little bit of Exhibition from seed, and maybe a sweet white variety if I can find the seeds, because they grow juicier and larger than Exhibition.
Aleksan9ra wrote:
Maybe I should just plant a couple of pounds of onion sets in the fall and call it a day.
Luda, planting onions before winter is one thing I will absolutely never do. Seriously, what’s the point? Planting onion sets isn’t like sowing carrots, you just push them into the ground and you’re done. Why risk overwintering them when you can easily plant a whole bed in half an hour in the spring?
And regarding seedlings… you’re the one who got me hooked on growing onions from seed in the first place, and now you are switching back to planting sets! I bought a little pint container of Stuttgarter sets from the farmers market, and nothing good came of them. My best onions still came from my own seedlings. But yes, out of 5 commercial seed packets, two didn’t germinate at all.
I pulled my onions today. They were looking so good before the disease hit them. But it turns out they split into 3 or even 4 small bulbs underground. So I ended up with tiny onions. I used to grow them without any problems, and my harvest would last until the next season. I thought it would always be like that. But for the last three years, I’ve been planting them late, and now I have almost no onions.
I bought Stuttgarter sets at a big box store this year. I don’t know what they mixed in there, but two of the bulbs were completely pink. When you give your harvest away, not everyone appreciates it, which really makes you pity the effort you put in. Though, of course, sometimes people do appreciate it and it’s a pleasure to share.
Galiy wrote:
…And for the last three years, I’ve been planting them late, and now I have almost no onions.
Galya, when do you pack up for the season in the fall? In September? If you stay until October, you could try planting a few sets before winter. Maybe that’s your perfect solution?
Anna! You asked me earlier why we should bother planting onion sets before winter, what’s the point?
Well, in my opinion, the selection of onion sets is much better in the fall, they are cheaper, the quality is higher, and they carry fewer diseases and pests. Once they are in the ground over winter, they actually rid themselves of pests rather than acquiring them (though this can vary). You also don’t have to mess with them in the spring – meaning buying them early, figuring out where to store them, and then planting them.
Overwintered onions are stronger. The green shoots appear about two weeks earlier in the spring, their resistance to spring pests is higher, and they mature earlier. Maturing earlier means they are much less affected by Downy Mildew in late summer. You can harvest and dry them by mid-July while the weather is still great. Fall planting is a fantastic option for weekend gardeners who don’t get out to their plots until May.
When we first started growing onions from seed, the whole point was to grow those giant, miraculous sweet onions that you simply cannot grow from sets. Plus, back then, the seed-grown onions didn’t get sick at all. They would stand tall and green without any fungicide sprays until the end of August. That was the whole point. But now the conditions have changed so much that the plants get diseased before the bulbs even size up.
Aleksan9ra wrote:
…you could try planting a few sets before winter. Maybe that’s your perfect solution?
Definitely not my solution. I always plant the tiniest sets in the fall, and they usually save me early in the spring. But this year, not a single one survived the winter.
I love the sun and lots of daylight. As soon as the cold and darkness approach, I just want to run away from the garden. I’m already stressed out. I think I just need to plan my onion bed better and prepare the soil properly. I keep remembering how everything used to grow without any problems. Those days are over for me, I’ve been working this plot for 20 years now.
Those sets from the big box store let me down. If they hadn’t split into multiple bulbs, I would have been happy with the harvest. The conclusion: you have to put time and effort into everything. And just because it worked in the past, doesn’t mean it will work now. I love growing vegetables, but it’s always a lottery. It’s so nice to be able to ask questions and get answers. Thank you, Ludmila, for your advice and recommendations, they really help us “young” vegetable growers! 😂 (Young in terms of gardening experience, anyway!)
I just cannot succeed with growing onions from seed, I wrote about it before. I’m not wasting my time on it this year. I used to plant onion sets inside my greenhouses before winter, and the greens would pop up very early in the spring. I never planted them outside in open beds, because I assumed they would freeze and rot from the melting snow. We get a massive amount of snow in the winter, it doesn’t fully melt until early May. I guess I need to try it outside!
