I'm Rob Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
I've got some onions that are ready to harvest so I wanted to talk a little bit
about how to harvest - how I harvest the onions, and some hints or things that
you need to be concerned about. When you harvest the onions they'll tell you when
they're ready to go; the neck will get weak just above the bulb here and bend
over. Up until that time, even in the winds, they'll stand up in the winds but
when they're ready to harvest that neck will bend over and then it's a little
bit weak right there. I use a garden fork with my - from my harvesting and the
reason I do that is because I've got pretty heavy soils; here in Eastern Utah
we've got fairly heavy soils. If you got a sandy soil, or a fluffy soil it's high
in organic matter, you may be able to just go ahead and pull the the onion out
without using the garden fork but I like to loosen it up. One of the things you
want to avoid doing is tearing off the top. That opens up - if it's not keep
properly cured - it opens up that end of the bulb and you can get fungal
organisms down there and cause some... some rot in your onions. So we'll come in here,
we'll take a look at these onions and how we get them harvested and we'll talk
a little bit about curing them and things like that. There are two different
varieties here: the white onion on the left is Super Star and it's ready to
harvest, on the right I have Elsa Craig which is a long day onion - a little bit
longer growing season - it hasn't started to bend over yet it's not ready to
harvest. What you're looking for is right here at the neck: when the neck bends
over, just naturally falls over, like that it's weakened at this point here; this
one there's still good, still strong stands up to the wind. This one is bent
over it's ready to harvest, it's ready to cure, so when you get the fork in here
you want to be away from the bulbs just a little bit so that you don't bruise
them as you're digging them up. One of the couple of things you have to be
careful of, first of all we talked about tearing off the tops, but you also want
to be careful to not bruise the scales. If you're going to cure them and store
them as whole onions you want to make sure
they don't get bruised; they'll last and store a lot longer if you do. So I'm
just loosening the soil around the bulbs and then I'll come back and pick them up
by hand when I've got this row done. The rule of thumb for when you're digging
onions when you're ready - when they're ready - to harvest, you want at least 50%
of these tops to be tipped over. If you just got a small family garden you can
just pull up those that are tipped and you don't have to dig up those that are
not tipped. So you can keep them in and keep growing; they'll still grow if the
tops aren't tipped over, the tops are tipped they stop growing. You want to avoid
trying to store something - this onion had had died; it got a little bit of rot in
it. We want to make sure that we throw those away, don't keep them with our
onions, the...if you leave them in the soil for too long there'll be more chance of
them getting that rot in them. But you've got the soil loosened all you got to do
is just grab them by the tops; something you want to avoid if you can is...is
grabbing a hold of the - grabbing a hold of the onion and pulling it by grabbing
that. That increases your risk of bruising the scales there so just get it
loosened up so that you can just grab them by the top and pull them out, shake
off the dirt, and now we'll talk a little bit about curing the onions. Curing
onions is the process of getting them from the slightly green state of harvest
down to a dried state that they'll store better. You want to make sure that it's
dried down at the neck so that you don't get disease organisms through it, so
there are some things that we can consider when we're doing that. I'll do
another video on some points to consider in curing your onions at home, but for
now here's another way to have fun in your garden.