A quick and easy way to get your onion seedlings planted.

🍄 A quick and easy way to get your onion seedlings planted. 🍄 I don't bother with sowing onion seeds because one, in this case, a $4.00 punnet will supply me with up to 25 seedlings once divided. 🍄 It also cuts around 6 weeks off of the growing onions process.


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An Onion a Day won't keep Tony away.

I won't profess here to know everything about onions, actually I find a lot of it rather confusing.

Late season, early season, onion sets, plant before the shortest day, plant after the shortest day and on and on it seems to go.

So I just do what works for me in a few simple steps.

• I tend to plant somewhere around the shortest day of the year. A bit before or a bit after.
  
• Soil preparation is a good dig over with the digging fork.

• Add blood and bone. I use Yates, Professional Blood and Bone.
  An organic based fertiliser suitable for all garden plants, including Australian natives. Provides nitrogen for healthy leaf growth and phosphorus for strong root development.
  

• Give the bed a good rake over.

• Grab a punnet of seedlings from my local plant nursery. I grabbed these about three weeks ago but today was the first chance I've had to bung them in.
  
• Separate the seedlings fairly carefully into individual little onion plants.
  
• Just dig a small hole with your first two fingers or a small trowel, place the seedling in the hole and back fill. Make sure you plant as close as possible to same depth as the seedling was in the punnet.
  
• Plant around six inches apart with around ten inches between rows. You can plant closer but you'll get smaller onions.
  
• From one, seedling punnet, I get on average around eighty onions. Great value.
  
• Water in well.

• I will apply a weekly liquid feed until I can see a bulb begin to form and from there they're on their own.

Some fun facts re the health benefits from onions. (from the Onions Australia website).

• Japanese women rarely get heart disease. This may be because (recent study) that 83 per cent of Japanese women obtain quercetin from onions.
• Quercetin in onions helps by stopping LDL cholesterol becoming oxidised - oxidised LDL carries cholesterol to the artery walls more quickly.
• According to Dutch research; half an onion a day keeps stomach cancer away.
• University of Hawaii found similar results in a study of lung cancer. Those who ate more onions were half as likely to get lung cancer.
• A French study has even indicated that onions and garlic may be helpful in guarding both men and women from breast cancer.
• The sulphur content of onions may also inhibit tumours.
• Onions can help to kill bacteria
• A Japanese study found by adding onions to ground beef helped neutralise Salmonella.
• Applied to the skin onions may have healing powers. People have used onions to kill funguses, yeast and parasites.
• Onions can also soothe the sting of insect bites

Cheers

Stewart.

Planted just ten days ago

 It's an overcast day here today with intermittent light drizzle and hardly a breeze to speak of. But the temperature is still high enough to make it a comfortable, if not slightly uninviting, day to go outside and work the veggie garden.

Having said that I still needed to go and feed the chooks and collect my one egg a day I've been getting lately (that's five chooks, one egg a day, equals four freeloaders or look at it another way. It costs me about two dollars to feed them their layer mash so I make that about two dollars per egg at the moment). So while I was out I went around and checked for any action on the seeds I've planted front and I'm pleased to announce to you the arrival (emergence) of my Hunter River Brown onions.

Planted just ten days ago and I have little baby onions popping up everywhere. There is a lot to be said for using fresh seeds.

A lot of veggies, especially slow growing veggies, don't like a lot of nitrogen in the soil so I prepared their bed by digging through some compost and aged stable horse manure, leaving out the blood and bone I usually apply as well, and boy don't the worms love this. That's about it for preparation. I planted the seeds as directed on the packet and kept the soil moist.

As they grow I'll apply fish emulsion and seaweed extract and mulch with more stable manure. Keep them moist and when the tops start to wither and brown off I'll know I'm nearly there and fresh onions are just a few weeks away.

Cheers and hoo roo

Stewart

Onions, onions, na na na

It's all about finishing. I've got at least half a dozen knitting projects started but not finished. Now I have one less. My onion bag knitted with garden twine on 15mm needles.

 Now all I need is some onions

Ooh, look. Here's some I prepared earlier.

Not a very good photo but I saw Peter Cundell plant onions by just laying them in a small trench and then back filling without trying to stand them up and in a day or two they are standing up all by themselves.

Now just water, weed and wait six months and I'll have onions for my bag.

I'll be planting more onions from seed I just wanted to get these in the ground for a good head start on the onion season.

Cheers
Stewart.