Help with onions please

suki1964

We have a raised vegetable bed Its filled with good compost and well rotted horse manure it's about 4 years old and is in a NW facing garden on the NW coast of NI

We have had great success with carrots, parsnips, sprouts and beans over the years, some success with beets and this year looks like we are going well with cabbage

However we have no luck whatsoever with onions

This year we tried red onion sets and already they have bolted

How do we grow onions?

We have frosts from October through to may and can have heavy snow over the winter. And of course much rain

We are complete amateurs so any advice will be gratefully received

trollopscarletwoman

I do find red onion sets such as Red Baron far more prone to bolting than white ones and know no obvious reason for it.

lollipopsarah

Our onions are doing really well this year and getting very large but we have had to pick of some bulb things from some of them - hubby reckons it's the horse manure he dig in before winter, as well as rotating the veg around our little bit of garden.
We have given up with carrots and tomatoes though as we just have no luck with them.
x

A._Badger

Make sure you buy heat treated onion sets next year. The heating process used kills the embryonic flower buds (well... most of them) and largely avoids the bolting issue.

suki1964

It's no matter what onions we get, even if we start from seed we don't have any luck. Thinking on we didn't have any joy with spring onions either, and the leeks, though usable were very small

Perhaps it's the soil?

We do get great carrots, even though I read before that carrots don't do well in a manure based soil

And we won't mention the rhubarb, that's like a tree it's that big ( just need some sun to ripen it)

A._Badger

I can't help wondering whether you have a bit too much nitrogen in your soil. It's a common mistake when people have access to a lot of manure just pile it on in the belief that it will guarantee better crops. It will certainly guarantee more leafy crops, but that's not what you are after with onions!

I do not add manure to whichever bed I am growing my onions in that year and I use Vitax Q4 as the fertiliser, which is not particularly high in nitrogen.

You might want to try a similar approach and, as I mentioned earlier, use heat treated sets.

forgotmyname

Thats what all the guys on the allotment tell me. Dont manure the patch where your going to plant onions.

But last years crop was the best yet. The winter prior to planting them i dug trenches approx 1 spade deep, Maybe a little deeper. Filled with manure and grass clippings and left it open all winter.

Start of the season i covered the trenches and created small mounds and planted the onions a week later.

As i already said that was my best crop.