Last February I was surprised with a nice little case of appendicitis and got to enjoy an appendectomy. I tried my best to follow doc’s orders for recovery which meant it wasn’t until late April before I could get in the dirt. Now over this past winter, with my healthy fit firm tight thick post-recovery bod, I’ve been perusing different gardening books and decided that 2024 would be the first year I “extended the growing season” by doing some indoor seed-starting and to get out into the garden earlier. Concepts completely new to me.
In December and January I browsed a decent number of videos on some edible gardening Youtube channels, which gave me nothing but anxiety and FOMO. Video titles like “Why JANUARY is the MOST IMPORTANT month for gardening!” or “843 crops you should be planting RIGHT NOW” etc. I found more solace in the written word which wasn’t trying to clickbait scare me into consuming more content, granted there were some video diamonds-in-the-rough. Books carry their own challenges however, where one must sift through tips and advice via the lens of where you live. Even gardening books with titles that were ‘Pacific Northwest’-specific still aren’t specific enough. The Pacific Northwest includes gardening hardiness zones 5b (northeastern WA) to 10b (northwestern CA) which are drastically different. After enough research however, I determined that there was indeed a crop where I could get my toes wet starting seeds in the winter. Enter: Onions.
I’m seed-starting two varieties of onions this year and one variety of shallots. Where I live, these crops can apparently be started as early as late January/early February. I’m calling these crops my Kickstart Crops™️. The varieties I chose were Golden Princess yellow onions, Transylvanian Red onions and Zebrune shallots.
I’m excited about onions not just because they can start this early, but also because I’ve heard they store well. When properly cured they can last all fall & winter which seems awesome to have them around in the next offseason. Now that I have my varieties picked out, and when I plan to start them, only one simple question remains…how the hell do you start seeds properly?
At first glance I was under the impression that I needed to use a sterile seed starting mix, free of any organic material that might kill the seedlings. While this applies to a lot of crops, apparently for onions they do just fine in traditional potting mix. So, that’s what I opted for.
I went with a basic potting soil we had kicking around from last season with some worm castings I purchased to amend the potting mix. Worm castings I’m told have various benefits including beneficial microbes, help with soil absorbency, and the placebo effect of me feeling like I’m such a genius soil concocter.
I’m using 3.5″ wide and 4″ deep containers (and one rogue container) for the onions and smaller containers for the shallots.
I mixed in some perlite for aeration so the seeds to help avoid any water-logging and I planted about 12-15ish onion seeds per container. With 4 containers I have a ceiling of about 60 onions, 30 of each variety if I don’t screw everything up.
Shallots are roughly 8-10 seeds per smaller container, with 2 containers
Finally, I popped these suckers on top of the warming mats I had plugged in. Here in our garage it’s about 10 degrees warmer than it is outside in the winter, and the warming mats add about 20 degrees. So for our average February lows of 40 degrees or so, the garage plus mats raise these container temps to about 70 degrees at a minimum, which is the lower temperature threshold needed for optimal seed starting (on paper).
These were started on February 4th. Let’s fast-forward into the future and see what kind of results we’re seeing on February 15th!
Holy Hot Damn, we’ve got action. Greenery is finally among us. The Zebrune shallots (right) are just peeking through. They’re lagging a bit behind their bigger brother and sister but I planted them a day later (February 5th). Anyhow, we’ve got growth! That means it’s time to start our next phase; the Grow Light phase.
Here’s the whole family, nestled in cozily like one big Funion Family. We’ve got our four onion containers, our two shallot containers, and what’s that? Two other containers? Where did those come from? What’s inside? I suppose that’s a post for another day…
AA
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