Growing Onion In Your Garden

This is one of the main vegetables. Its uses are many, and they are all well known. The modes of cultivation for crop are various. Three I shall mention, and by either a good crop may be raised. Sow in the fall or early in the Spring.

Let the ground be rich, but not from fresh, dung. Make the ground very fine; make the rows a foot apart, and scatter the seed thinly along a drill two inches deep. Then fill in the drills; and then press the earth down upon the seed by treading the ground all over. Then give the ground a very slight smoothing over with a rake.

When the plants get to be three inches high, thin them to four inches, or to eight inches if you wish to have very large onions. Keep the ground clear of weeds by hoeing; but, do not hoe deep, nor raise earth about the plants; for these make them run to neck and not to bulk.

When the tips of the leaves begin to be brown, bend down the necks, so that the leaves lie flat with the ground. When the leaves are nearly dead, pull up the onions, and lay them to dry, in order to be put away for winter use.

Some persons, instead of sowing the onions all along the drill drop four or five seeds at every six or seven inches distance; and leave the onions to grow thus, in clumps; and this is not a bad way; for, they will squeeze each other out. They will not be large; but, they will be ripe earlier, and will not run to neck.

The third mode of cultivation is as follows: sow the onions any time between April and the middle of June, in drills six inches apart, and put the seed very thick along the drills. Let all the plants stand, and they will get to be about as big round as the top of your little finger.

Then the leaves will get yellow, and, when that is the case, pull up the onions and lay them on a board, till the sun have withered up the leaves. Then take these diminutive onions, put them in a bag, and hang them up in a dry place till spring. As soon as the frost is gone, and the ground dry, plant out these onions in good and fine ground, in rows a foot apart.

Make, not drills, but little marks along the ground; and put the onions at six or eight inches apart. Do not cover them with the earth; but just press them down
upon the mark with your thumb and forefinger. The ground ought to be trodden and slightly raked again before you make the marks; for no earth should rise up, about the plants.

Proceed after this as with sown onions; only observe, that, if any should be running up to seed, you must twist down the neck as soon as you perceive it. But, observe this: the shorter the time that these onions have been in the ground the year before, the less likely will they be to run to seed. Preserving onions is an easy matter.

Frost never hurts them, unless you move them during the time that they are frozen. Any dry, airy place, will, therefore, do. They should not be kept in a warm place; for they will heat and grow. The neatest way is to tie them up in ropes; that is to say, to tie them round sticks, or straight straw, with matting (See Endive.)

For seed, pick out the finest onions, and plant them out in rich land, in the spring. To grow this seed upon a large scale, plough the land into four feet ridges, lay plenty of dung along the furrows, plough the ground back over the dung, flatten the top of the ridge a little, and put along, on the top of the ridge two rows of onions, the rows seven inches apart, and the onions seven inches apart in the rows.

When the weeds come, hoe the tops of the ridges with a small hoe, and plough first from and then to the ridges, two or three times, at the distance of two or three weeks, as in the case of Rutabag'a, cultivated in the field. When the seed is ripe, cut off the heads and collect them in such a way as not to scatter the seed. Lay them on cloths, in the sun, till dry as dust; and then thresh out the seed.

The seed will be dead ripe in Au gust, and transplanted Rutabaga, or Early York Cabbages, or even Kidney dwarf beans, or, perhaps, Buckwheat, may follow upon the same ground, the same year. In a garden there always ought to be a crop to succeed seed onions the same summer.

Read about peanut plant and rosemary plant at the Plants And Flowers website.

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