Some Practical Tips for Harvesting Onions
Harvesting onions is not at all that difficult. If you’ve planted and grown your onions, you are already past the hard part.
As soon as you see onions that look like onions, they are ready for you pluck them from the ground. Harvesting onions can take place on the very first day that you see one formed or days later, when you have a nice bunch of onions nestled together. The best time for harvesting onions, however, is during the waning days of summer heat when they have grown to full maturity and ampleness of size.
Timing your Harvest
The key sign that onions have reached full maturity and will become no larger is on the top of the onion where you can find the leaves. The hue of these leaves will fade and the leaves will lose vitality, drooping down like sad puppy’s ears.
When four out of five of your onions show this sign of maturing, then you are only ten days from harvesting onions. After most leaves have matured however, be sure, however, you don’t leave your onions in the ground for much longer. If you do leave your onions there, pests may search out and infest your onions, leading to the ruin of your harvest.
If possible, tug up your onions on a day when the sky is clear and the forecast is for heat and sun. Once you have them all up, lay them out on a stone surface to remove all the excess moisture. This sun baking process will stunt the roots so they don’t continue to reach for more water.
Drying your Onion Harvest
Harvesting onions after a rainy day is a bad idea because the extra water the onions hold will decrease their shelf life afterwards.
The second stage of drying takes place indoors. Scalping the leaves off the onions is a good idea at this point. Be sure, however, to leave about an inch or so of leaf so that the onion has enough slack left over for the shrinkage that occurs during the drying process. If you don’t, you increase the chance of onions rotting in storage.
The best place for the second step of the drying process, sometimes called “curing,” is a Southern style veranda where they will have quite a bit of circulation but no direct solar contact. If you simply don’t have a place like this that you can spare for a couple of weeks while your onions dry, put them out on a stone surface which gets direct sunlight, but shield your onions by layering a thin bed sheet over them. This will allow for the heat necessary without the harmful solar rays coming into direct contact with your onions. The sheet is also useful if you live in an area where you are prone to light and unexpected late summer sprinkles. Your sheet then serves as an umbrella for your onions. Beware, however, you do not expect too much from this thin permeable covering; if it rains hard you want to remove your onion harvest back into the house.
Don’t use plastic or any shielding cover that will keep moisture from escaping, or else drying will not actually occur.
Be sure to rotate your onions periodically so they dry equally on all sides. Examine your onions carefully after a week to see how the drying process is going. No onion is ready until you have eliminated any surface area containing moisture. This process typically takes about two weeks but may last up to a month.
Even when you think you are done, I would advice you to hang the onions up in a net in your garage for a week to give it yet another stage of drying.
When you are completely done, place them in your root cellar or a similarly dry, dark place.