I’m on Cape Cod, Massachusetts where we’re supposed to grow long day onions. I usually don’t have great results probably because my garden winds it’s way around large trees and I’m on a SE slope and I don’t have many spots with all day sun. So I wonder if day length bulbing activation in onions has something other than quantity of sun at play. Even though we have long summer days could I plant short day onions in an area with less sun and expect to get good results?
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I can grow both short-day, and long-day onions. The only difference that I notice between them is when the bulb swells.
I believe that nature is fuzzy. Things rarely fit into the either/or boxes that I was taught while growing up. These days I tend to think of things as BOTH/AND.
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I’ve never paid much attention to the long day/short day thing. I just plant whatever I get ahold of. I plant seeds in late summer or early fall and anything that sprouts, and lives is allowed to seed the next year. Mine seem to be moving to a bunching type of habit which I’m very happy with because I like to just go out and get some about any time rather than harvesting and storing. If there is an off-season, it’s hot summer when some of them apparently die but they sprout back up when cooler weather arrives.
A lot of them don’t make much of a bulb at all, just little green onion type things which is what I like. Quite a few others do still make bulbs which if not harvested tend to rot and resprout in clumps in late winter. Those might be divided to regrow into bulbs again, but I mostly leave them in the crowded clumps because that’s what we like and I’m lazy. I plant grocery store onions too, in late summer or fall and most of them do the same thing, rot and come back up in clumps.
This fall I saw some at a market the size of basketballs, well maybe not quite but they were huge. They had little stickers that said Product of Peru. One of them was soft on the bottom and had five or six yellow leaves poking out the top so I bought it to plant and another one to taste. The planted one took right off growing and is out there looking happy as a clam right now. Fingers crossed it has normal flowers. The other one was very mild and delicious.
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