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Posted by whatalottie (U9072847) on Saturday, 30th April 2011
My onions (autumn planted) obviously haven't heard that they shouldn't start to bulb until the daylength is right. They're beginning to bulb now, it must be at least a month too early?
Does anyone else have this problem?
Lottie
That's OK, the weatherman thinks it's midsummer too.
Shhhhh...nobody tell him otherwise!
Sorry, bulb up? What do you mean? I thought they would do this gradually. How do you tell this is going on? Mine doesn't seem to be doing much than produce a couple of leaves.
Well, thy've got quite a lot of leaves, but they are definately starting to swell at the base and beginning to push themselves out of the soil.
I've been told that this shouldn't happen until the days were longer! Onions are light sensitive rathr than heat sensitive, so I've been told! -(maybe?)
Lottie
Mine must have listened to different weather reports as they haven't started to produce that much leaves nor have the base started to swell.
K-J, sorry swedboy
It sounds as if your onions need a bit of feed, they should e romping away by now, general fertilizer is ok, N and K more importnt than P
whatalottie: I did a bit of reading on this because this year for the first time i planted some overwintering onions, exactly because I wanted some early maturing onions - so it can't just be a matter of length of day.
Well what I've come up with is that actually there are many types of onions, which can be divided in terms of daylight length required before "bulbing up" occurs.
The overwintering type may need a little less daylength than the types usually sown for maturing in July.
But it seems as if it isn't just daylight, temperature is a factor and it seems that the overwintering types are more responsive to the change in daylight and temperature.
Given that we have had a quite above average number of weeks of sunshine, both actual amounts of light as well as temperature have been well above normal. Your onions are probably reacting to this and you can't do too much about it except keep watering moderately until the leaves flop over by themselves.
In that case, more wormtea is on the menue.
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