Well, many of you might be eyeballing some onions that need some harvesting. There are some important keys to achieving long term storage with onions. So, let’s discuss some of the necessary processes when it comes to harvesting and storing onions!
Onions are very frost tolerant and also quite field hardy, so you have a fair bit of leeway in harvest timing. The ideal harvesting day is after a relatively dry period. That is, if you can get one. Drier soils will help the skin of the onion stay intact, which aids in long term storage. If you’re struggling to get a streak of dry weather, like we often do, a lightly damp day is certainly better than a wet one.
Once you’ve harvested those onions, we generally prefer to snip off the greens and trim up the roots a bit. You certainly can leave the greens on the for the upcoming steps, but they do make your onions take up quite a bit more space. Those greens will eventually dry up, anyway, and they make great compost fodder. If you’re so inclined, the greens are edible and can be used like green onions.
There’s a brief step you need to take with onions, prior to that long term storage. It’s called curing. And don’t worry, it’s not hard! Curing onions is as simple as laying them out on a table in a single layer for 10-14 days. We generally prefer to do this step indoors as there’s a lot less temperature variability and zero risk of weather. You want good air circulation, but there’s no need for fans or anything like that. Ideal temperatures are 60F and warmer.
This step induces what is called dormancy in the onion, which is what allows it to hold up for the long term so well. Also, save cleaning the onions until you use them as the light soil covering will also help them store well. You can certainly brush off any major dirt, which we do after they’ve cured, but just don’t wash them. Oh, and be gentle with freshly harvested onions as they are easily bruised until they are fully cured.
Once your onions are cured, you want to sort them by “perfect” and “damaged” prior to storage. If pieces of the onion are missing or there’s an obvious hole in the stem, you want to use those onions first. A fully formed and enclosed onion is ideal for long term storage. You can typically get 6-12 months of storage time, depending on the variety.
Assuming you follow the curing step, you should be ready to store those onions for the long haul! We’ll talk about how we store those onions soon, but the gist is that mesh bags are an ideal format. (Similar to how large bags of onions at the grocer are sold.) You want to keep them exposed to air, but also keep them out of direct sunlight and definitely adverse conditions. We usually store them in one of our coolest rooms in the house.
We’re super excited about these, but especially our shallots that we grew this year. It’s been a lot of years since we’ve grown shallots, we haven’t grown them since they brought in a major onion fly infestation! But, we’ve been confident in our protections and our final results definitely show it!
