Life in Southeast Alaska

1064 Onions

Whew!  I finished planting my onion plants tonight - all 1064 of them.  Actually I have about 100 more, but they will have to wait until I decide where I'm going to put them.  The onions that I planted were Copra which are a storage onion.  I order my plants from Dixondale Farms in Texas - www.dixondalefarms.com.  The more you buy, the cheaper they are.  So I talked to a couple people at work and we got an order together.  I ordered them last Sunday night and they arrived in the mail on Friday. 

I started planting them Friday night.  They went into one of my raised beds - 3 feet by 16 feet.  I had prepared the soil and added 2 buckets of sand to loosen up the soil.  Then I spread some fertilizer - about 1 1/2 pounds of Roots Alive from Gardens Alive and mixed that all in.  I made myself a planting guide out of a piece of lathe strip.  It is just over 3 feet long and is about 2 inches wide.  I used a permanent marker and made marks every 2 1/2 inches.  I laid this across the raised bed, poked 1 inch deep holes at each mark, set in my onion plants and firmed the soil around.  Then I moved the planting guide down the bed so that the rows of plants would be about 2 1/2 inches apart.  I only did a few rows on Friday, worked a bit more on Saturday, then again on Sunday - had about 500 done by then.  I came home tonight and set in the rest.  Feels so good to have all those done!

I will use every other onion as a green onion throughout the summer and the rest will be left to bulb and form onions.  If things work well, we will have enough onions to store until next year.  I will be adding a cover to the bed to protect it from too much rain and to keep the heat in so they will produce quicker - the cover will also discourage slugs which are a terrible problem!