Let's Grow Stuff

– Qwantese Winters: Remember those tiny onions that I planted a few months ago?

Well, their summer vacation is over and it's finally time to harvest.

You ready?

Let's grow stuff!

[upbeat electronic music] My onions did pretty good this year despite the drought we experienced.

Overall, they were a low-maintentance part of the garden.

I fertilized a few times and kept up on my watering and weeding.

They've been in the ground for about a hundred days, and some of them are ready to go.

First, let's check out an onion that looks good but isn't quite ready yet.

When the neck of the onion is stiff like this, it's not ready to be harvested.

You could pull this onion and eat it, but it won't store well.

We're looking for ones where the top has flopped, the stem has turned color maybe, and literally just fallen over.

That means that those onions are ready and can be prepared for long-term storage.

But there are a few things that you should know before you start yanking them out of the ground.

First, check the weather.

We only want to harvest in dry conditions.

If the onion tops are flopped and look ready, wait until the ground is completely dry, like, no rain for a few days.

You've got about two weeks to work with once your onion tops flop over.

So if you can time your harvest to happen in dry conditions, that's what I would do.

Ultimately, your onions just store better this way.

To harvest, you'll simply grab the onion by its sides and pull.

And you can give it a twist if you need to.

The neck is pretty fragile at this point, so avoid yanking that if you can.

Some people let their onions sit out for a day or two just like this.

They do this to cure them so the skin gets nice and dry and papery and the necks seal in order to block out moisture.

I don't wanna chance my onions going bad, so I'm gonna put these in my basket and cure them at home.

Let's categorize these as we go.

Not all onions are best for curing, like this one.

As you can see, the neck has flopped, but it hasn't developed the papery skin on the outside.

We could still cure it, but these outer fresh layers will just become papery and unedible, and ultimately, we'll have less onion to eat.

So I would just start a pile of onions that I know that I wanna eat sooner than the ones that I wanna cure.

And for the ones we wanna cure and ultimately store, leave the stems on.

It helps the moisture seal down into the bulb.

Remember, we're in the process of drying, drying, drying, so don't wash them.

Any dirt that's on here now will easily come off later.

You can cure them in the garage, an air-conditioned room, or anything that will help to promote the drying with adequate, cool airflow, and will protect them from moisture.

They'll need four weeks to cure.

Now, all of your hard work with your onions is done, and the only thing left to figure out is how to cut them without crying.

Thank you so much for watching, and you can catch more episodes at letsgrowstuff.org.

See ya!

– Announcer: Funding for Let's Grow Stuff is provided by the Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programs and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.