Harvesting Onions

I love growing, storing, and cooking with onions. They can be used in so many different types of dishes. The timing on harvesting onions can seem a little tricky so I wanted to share a bit of information with you. And I also wanted to point out something that can impact how long they’ll keep in storage.

As I’ve occasionally mentioned in my columns and videos, the thing I love about onions is that they “tell” you when they’re done growing. That’s because their stems tend to fall over, indicating that the bulb has finished growing. 

The photo above was taken of my ‘Copra’ onion patch. We love ‘Copra’ because they store quite a long time… like anywhere from 8 to 12 months, which is fabulous. You’ll notice that the stalks of most of the onions in the photo have fallen over. That is perfectly normal.

When the majority of your onions have done that, it’s time to stop watering them. Pull up the bulbs and either leave them in place on the soil surface or move them to a sheltered area where they won’t get wet, so they can dry out thoroughly. You do NOT want them to get rained on or watered in any way!

Once the bulbs are papery dry, you can move them to their long-term storage area, where it is cool and dark. We use the unheated area of our basement for this.

But there’s another important thing I wanted to point out to you: 

Do you see in the photo to the right how there are some thick stems that are still standing straight up? (you can click on the photo to view a larger image) In the past couple of years, I’ve learned that those onions will not be suitable for storage and should be used first.

Why is that? The thick stem is an indication that something happened to that plant start early in its life that has impacted its ability to have a normal growth cycle. If you were to cut up one of those onions, you’d see that the center of the onion is abnormal. The rest of the onion is still edible, but those onions just won’t keep for very long.

In that case, we will either use them right away in some dishes, or we’ll chop them up and store them in freezer bags in the freezer, for later use. So all is not lost, but I did want to give you a heads-up about this odd problem and how those onions won’t have a normal storage life.

I have no idea what happened to our onion plant starts that would cause this, but it’s certainly a frustrating issue that can occur from time to time.