onions

I love onions,
here is my field of them

first a note on day length,
there are 4 types of day lengths on the onions,
long day, short day, intermediate day, and day neutral.
if you are in alaska, or even sacramanto or sanfrancisco you need long day,
if you are in arazona you need short day,
if you are in fresno (or where I am) you need intermediate day,
the day nutral ones are suppose to work everywhere (I am not sure they do this very well)

onion roots are shallow, so watering often not that deep is good, deep watering is kind of pointless

there are a few kinds of onions out there, 
growing the one type of onion can be a bit hard,
and there is a good reason for it, but the commercial growers like them because it matches how they have things set up, .
the trick to get it to work is to plant the seeds in a flat in fall sometime,
then when the tiny onions get to be about 1/4 inch knock all the tops over and let dry out,
if you let them get to be bigger than about a marble then they will likely go to seed early (like you can see happening in my onion field.
then plant the tiny bulbs out in the early spring.
now to avoid a lot of work you can just buy onion sets,
they are the tiny bulbs already done for you, but usually they are to big and can mess up.

next you take the best of the onions you grew and plant them back out to get more seeds,
and that is kind of a pain, but very possible,
if you save your own seeds from one year to the next and only pick the good ones to save you will end up with a good type adapted to your local conditions, and that will pay off if you do it.

another kind of onion is the bunching onion or multiplier onion

and they just divide in 2 when they get big enough, rarely go to seed, and tend not to care about day length
so as a gardener all you have to do is when you harvest, pick the bunch, and pull off one and put it back in the ground,
it is super simple
so I went looking for them,
and they turned out to be hard to get,
modern agriculture does not deal with crops that way so they have been ignored,
but I hope to turn all my garden into that kind of onion at some point,
and this splitting of the onions is something that all the onions use to do,
but people have selected out for one bulb

 but I had noticed that some of my regular onions had split

so I started looking into it,
also I will try to save seeds from the ones that split and see if I can get more that split, but that is a distraction,

back to onions that are suppose to split,
there is a neat one ( I'itoi's Onion) that will grow with the spring and fall rain and go dormant in the middle if there is no water,
I had them at one time years ago and the gofers ate all of them,
but 2 years later finally managed to get them again,

I got them here
http://shop.nativeseeds.org/collections/onions/products/b001
I had it bookmarked and checked back every day for a long time

here is a place my friend showed me that has that one and quite a few other ones,
http://heirloomonions.com/?page_id=160
but read the shipping note...
I will likely order soon anyway

now time to go eat an onion that the gofer only ate the roots, but not the bulb