Growing Great Garlic And Splendid Onions

Here in the mild maritime Northwest, cold snaps seldom linger long and spring seems to arrive close on the heels of our brief winters. By February or March, it’s usually warm enough to begin sowing a few crops like winter lettuces, beets, and early carrots if we have a cold frame to work with. We can also set out garlic and onion sets, which can also be started in late fall (October and November).
Garlic and onions are easy crops for novice gardeners, providing clean, fresh, pesticide-free produce for your kitchen with very little effort. What’s more, you can harvest onion greens all winter long, and enjoy garlic tip soup for New Year’s. Indeed, all gardeners who like to cook are blessed with a terrific abundance of onion and garlic options.
Onions, garlic, and the related shallots are all members of the lily family. All also belong to the allium clan, which contains Allium cepa, the common onion; A, sativum, which is garlic; A. schoenprasum, or chives; A. tuberosum, or garlic chives; and A. cepa aggregatum, also called shallots.
If you plant out garlic and onion sets in fall, they quickly send up green sprouts. Harvest these lightly to avoid over taxing your bulbs, but do snip some for use in soups and salads. Garlic tips are the tops of the tender young shoots of over-wintering garlic, while onion greens are the longer, crisp and hollow stems produced by fall planted onions.
Top onions or bulbing onions produce a plump bulb in the ground and a fat bloom stalk, with clusters of small onions appearing on the seedhead of the bloom stalk. Left to over-winter, top onions often plant themselves, the leggy stalks bending with age to spill the babies on the ground, where they take root and reproduce freely.
Chives and garlic chives are largely deciduous, crumpling to mush in a hard freeze. However, they reappear quickly as soon as the cold lets up and can be harvested judiciously in mid to late winter. Chives like plenty of compost and need room to spread into their thick mats of lush green, aromatic stems.
To plant your summer garlic and onion crops now, find a sunny spot well away from any irrigation system. Remember that ripening onions and garlic need to dry out before harvest to keep them from rotting. They don’t mind being wet now, when they are in active growth. However, excess summer water will prevent all allium crops from firming up properly and they won’t store well.
For the best results, give your alliums good, well drained garden soil. Sandy soil works very well as long as you dig in plenty of mature compost before planting. Heavy soil can lead to root rots, which are pretty serious problems for a root crop vegetable. If your soil is heavy, grow your alliums in mounded beds and add some coarse sand or grit as well as lots of good compost to the soil to open it up.
When you plant, place a one-inch long garlic clove an inch beneath the soil surface, and set a two-inch shallot bulb two inches deep. Onion sets should be planted to the pale, bulbing portion of the root is covered by soil but the green shoot is above ground. You can space garlic and shallots quite closely, since the bulbs aren’t very large. Set the cloves 4-6 inches apart, unless you are planting elephant garlic, which should be set 8-12 inches apart to make room for the huge bulb clusters. Onion sets can be spaced 6-8 inches apart.
Though far more expensive, shallots are as simple to grow as onions and garlic, yielding lovely, chunky cloves with pinkish or golden brown wrappers. The rosy skinned shallots have a milder, more subtle flavor than the golden skinned ones, which tend to have more bite.
Alliums are cool weather crops, growing well despite chilly soil and air temperatures. Once warm weather arrives, your onion family members will grow steadily, and if you like, you can harvest baby onions by late April or early May.
For big storing onions, leave the bulbs in the ground until the foliage collapses. It is critical that the bulbs dry out once the foliage starts to turn yellow, so just leave them alone. Some folks like to rake down the onion leaves to encourage the bulbs to ripen off, but you don’t really need to.
If you plan to braid your garlic, harvest them before the foliage is completely soft and brown. If you aren’t a braider, you can trim the leaves off altogether at harvest time. Let the bulbs dry off in a dry, warm place out of direct sun light. This curing stage may last for 3-4 weeks or longer, especially if you are growing the tasty hardneck garlic beloved of gourmet chefs.
The softneck garlic sold in supermarkets is not as tasty as the many hardneck varieties prized by cooks. As with shallots, pink or red skinned garlic is usually better flavored than brown or white skinned types. Look for plump cinnamon colored ‘Nootka Rose’, rosy ‘Spanish Roja’, and ruddy ‘German Red’, all of which are easy to grow in the Northwest.
You’ll find fresh onion, garlic, and shallot sets at most nurseries now. You can also find onion seed, which can be sown now but will take a lot longer to produce a harvestable crop. Bon appetite!