The life of an onion

These are onion seed heads we harvested mid-summer and let dry down.

These are the onion seeds (black dots) with chaff.  It's often not necessary to get homegrown seed perfectly free of chaff.  In this case, the chaff and seeds will all get planted without issue.

We planted those seeds yesterday in an outdoor bed.  This is a little later than ideal, but the onions will be fine.  The seeds were planted in rows and covered back with dirt.  We watered them in and covered the bed with old storm windows to act as a mini-greenhouse.  They should start to germinate in a week or so.  They will grow some more this fall then pretty much go dormant all winter.  Come late winter they will finish growing into pencil sized onion plants we will transplant out in garden beds.  They will make bulb onions around June/July.  We planted Red Stockton and Yellow of Parma seed we'd saved and purchased Walla Walla seed.

As we harvest bulb onions during the summer , we set aside three dozen or so of the biggest and nicest shaped of each variety for seed.  These we bunch up and hang in an outbuilding until fall.

Then late October/early November we plant these bulb onions in a garden bed.  They will grow a little in the fall then become dormant over the winter.  Late winter they will grow into what looks like a bunch of green onions.  Then in early summer they will send up flower stalks.  Then they will flower and set seed.  Once the stalks are mostly dried down, we'll collect the seed stalks and heads to dry for the rest of the summer.  Those seeds will then be used to plant onions in the onion cold frame in the fall, and so the cycle continues.