We just received word that our onion plants were shipped today and should arrive and be ready for sale by Friday or Saturday! We’ll be offering onion plants in bundles of approximately 60 to 70 plants, and half-bundles of approximately 30-35 plants.
Onions are sensitive to day-length during their growing season. The onions that grow well at our latitude are either Long-Day or Intermediate-day varieties. Long-day onions are adapted specifically to northern latitudes where summer days are are long and summer sun is intense. They can even be grown very successfully in places like Alaska, where the frost-free season is very short but the days are extremely long in summer.
The earlier you can plant them, the more time they have to photosynthesize before the Summer Solstice and the bigger the bulbs will be at maturity.. After that, the plants sense the daylight hours getting shorter, and that’s when they begin sending their energy into the storage bulbs that we use in our cooking, and the bigger the bulbs will be at maturity. We’ll offer two long-day varieties: ‘Patterson’, our large, very hard, ‘yellow’-skinned, very long-storing onion is the best storage onion variety available in bundled plants. We will also have ‘Redwing’, an excellent red storage onion, also best of it’s class available in bundles.
Our Intermediate-day onion is the famed and favorite sweet variety,
Walla Walla, which is meant for use within a few months of harvest and
can’t be stored successfully for long.
Onion Starts
We also grow onions, leeks and shallots from seed, organically, and offer them in 2 1/2″ pots with approximately 6 plants per pot. These will be available soon. Growing them from seed enables us to bring you additional delicious ‘specialty’ varieties like the Italian ‘Long Red of Tropea’, ‘Rossa di Milano’ red storage onion, ‘Red Marble’ and ‘Gold Coin’ cipollini, and ‘Ailsa Craig’, a wonderful, huge, sweet heirloom named for a mountain in Scotland. We’ll also have two varieties of leeks – one for summer harvest and one for winter, and two lovely gourmet varieties of shallots!