[Windy background noise] I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we are going to plant onion transplants or onion sets,
the method is both the same for each one of those.
The other way to do onions is to plant them by seed.
In order to do seed in the high country, you need to be planting them late March,
at the latest, to get the seed up and going and get your onions big enough to form some bulbs.
So we are going to make some furrows, put some water in the furrows,
and then plant the sets, and I'll show you how that's done.
Alright, now here I have formed some furrows with the corner of my hoe
and because we live in dry country, we need to make sure we have good moisture
and therefore the seeds or the transplants, or sets, will do well.
If we have dry ground, then the roots just aren't going to grow. So, we need to make sure that we have plenty of moisture.
I'm using this little soaker thing, it's pretty gentle. It's a slow way of getting water introduced to a furrow.
You can use the end of the hose, but it kind of tends to blast things out.
If I have a long row that I want to soak,
I use my soaker hose end to let the water soak down into the furrow.
Hose ends or soaker
And then, when that one is full, I just switch it to this other one and let it soak.
My ground slopes that way, so I get this slow soaking and let it kind of move in that direction.
So now, we will let that soak in and then we will do some planting.
[cow mooing in background] Alright, what I have here is onion transplants which I ordered in.
But you can also do this same technique with onion sets that you can get from your local garden center.
You may even be able to find some onion transplants from your local garden center.
When you plant onions, you basically are just going to stick them in the ground, and you want them about 4 to 6 inches apart.
You don't want to stick them down very deep
because the bulb is going to basically be forming up at the surface.
So, that's all we're doing. Planting these. We can kind of cover those in a little bit if we want to.
Kind of help that soil moisture stay there.
Keeping our plants 4 to 6 inches apart.
And we will have an onion patch. Nice thing about onions is that we use them all of the time.
You can get sweet onions, you can get pungent onions, it all depends. The pungent onions tend to store longer.
[birds chirping in distance] So if you want something that's going to last for several months in your storage cellar,
then you would want to get something that is maybe not quite so sweet.
If you get something like the Spanish Yellow Sweet or some of those onions,
they will store for three or four months in the proper conditions.
But, not nearly as long as those that are a little bit stronger onions.
It only takes us a few minutes and we've got ourselves a row of onions.
Okay, we've about got this patch planted.
Now onions can be planted fairly early in the Spring.
You can plant your sets out and your transplants out in early April.
You can probably get your sets out maybe even a little bit earlier than that because it'll take a little while for them to get going.
But typically in the high desert country of Utah,
we're looking at the first week or two of April as a good time to set out transplants.
Maybe a week or so earlier than that for the sets.
We've got them planted, maybe cover them just a little bit. We don't need to cover them much.
They're down into that wet soil and we will have onions.
By late June, we should start getting some of these onions to bulb up,
and we will have some nice onions for our salad or whatever we want to have onions for.
Most people like to just eat onions. They can even do that. So, there's another way to plant your garden.
[Silence]