Planting Onions in Early January 2022

My onion sets I purchased arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago.  I've been too busy with work to get them in the ground.  I am studying to pass the State Licensing Exam for Insurance Adjusters.  It's a big test (150 questions with 160 minutes to take it).  I'm taking it Monday after studying for over a month.  I need a 70% score to pass.  This has taken up a lot of my time and so I haven't been as diligent in getting things done that I normally do.

Time to do something about that!  Tuesday afternoon, I got some baling twine (so useful), a hoe, a rake, and determination and headed out to plant roughly 250 onions.  As described in a previous post, they are short-day onions and I got Red Creole, Texas White, 1015 Sweet, and Yellow Granex.  They will do fine for about 3 weeks without planting, but I needed to get them in the ground!

Onions are planted four inches apart and one inch deep.  You don't want to plant them any deeper or they won't bulb.  I forgot one essential tool in planting onions - the rolling seat you see on the right below.  It was my grandmother (Bumby's) gardening seat.  It sure comes in handy and saves the old back!

Once you get one row planted, you mark off 6 inches from the onions and dig a trench four inches deep and four inches wide and sprinkle 1/2 cup of organic fertilizer and then cover.

Then you mark off 6 inches from your fertilizer trench and plant another row of onions.

Once I got all the onions planted, I watered them in.  Onions are a hardy crop, but they require lots of water and lots of weeding.  They don't like competition from weeds for their nutrients.  I'll mulch around them to accomplish this once they show some good growth.

It took me two hours to finish, but at the end, I had four rows of onions.  Hopefully, we will have a good crop again in 2022.  2021 was a record year for us with onions and we're trying to repeat it.  The cows look on approvingly at the onion planting.  Below you can see from left to right: (Elsie, Clarabelle, Rosie, and LuLu sitting)

We'll post and show progress on the onions throughout the growing season.  If you're ever interested, we get our onion plants from Dixondale Farms.  Check them out on the Internet.  They are a good outfit and I highly recommend them.  I'm looking at picking up some seed potatoes from the feed store tomorrow and will cut them so they'll scab over.  Once that's done, we'll get them in the ground.