Perhaps you have tried to harvest an onion that overwintered in your garden, but upon digging it up discovered it felt mushy. Your first instinct was probably to throw it away. Nobody wants to eat a mushy onion. But there might be another option. The onion might not be mushy because it is rotten. It might be mushy because it has moved on to spring division of its bulb. If you pull away the mushy part, you might just find spring onions that you can either eat or replant!
I have grown onions here in southwest Idaho most of the 30 plus years I have been gardening here. I have grown them mostly from seed. A few times I have used what are called onions sets, which are basically tiny little onions. I have not found the onion sets give me any advantage over seeds for onion size in one year. Since onion sets are a bit more expensive, I usually just plant seeds. Which ever way I have started growing onions, I have almost always had some onions left in the fall that grew over the winter.
One thing to note is that onions are biennial. This means that they produce seed the second year of growing. When you plant onion sets, they have already grown one year, so will try to flower and produce seed the year you plant them. Whenever my onions go to seed, I cut off the flowers or seed heads as soon as I can so that the plant will put all of its energy into growing the bulb. The onion bulb seems to deteriorate when the onion plant goes to seed. If you want to save seeds, one or two seed heads is probably enough for the average home gardener.
When I have planted from seed, I have gotten nice big onions the following late winter or early spring. If I have been able to keep up with cutting back the flowers, then the onions usually keep growing a bigger bulb.
For almost 20 years, I had bunching onions as well, which never get to a typical onion size, but constantly divide into masses of onions, kind of like grass spreads by the roots. That is not what I am talking about with the onions in this video. These onions were the kind that grew to a good sized bulb for Idaho.
I have to be honest with you, I’m not sure if this division of onion bulbs is only something that happens after the second year with onions. I just haven’t kept track of that. The onions in the video were grown from sets last year.
After I got done planting my freshly divided onions, it reminded me of a Tahitian grass skirt, hence the name of the video:
