How to Harvest, Cure, and Store Onions

Hey guys, I'm Mark and I want to show you how to harvest, cure, and store your onions. You can see right now I'm in a bed of candy onions, that's what type of onion that this is, and they are ready to harvest. And the way you can tell that they're ready to harvest is that they've started to fall over every here and there and so often. I've got some larger ones, I've got some smaller ones. These particular onions were planted as transplants, so I sowed seed for these back in November and I've transplanted the plants into this bed the first week of May, which is a little late for this area for onions. I really ideally would have liked to got them in the first week or so of April, but I did what I had to work with and overall I'm not too sad about them. I've got some pretty big ones in here and then I've got some smaller ones here and there as well. These are going to be great for pickled onions, little small guys like this. But anyway, basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to start pulling every single onion up and I'm just going to lay it right out on the ground and I'm going to leave these guys here for a couple days, a few days. If it looks like it's going to rain, then I'll come out here with a bin or a wheelbarrow and I'll scramble and pick them all up really quickly. I'm able to do that because I don't have a super huge amount of them. If I had like a quarter acre of onions planted, then I would probably get them on drying racks right away. But in this case, I'm just going to sort of lay them out and this will just kind of help start the curing process. They can do this right in the field and just get a jump start on things. Now something that you're going to want to look for when you're pulling these out is you're going to want to look for the ones that have a thicker stem on them. This particular one isn't really super thick, but sometimes they can be thicker than this. Those are going to be the onions that aren't going to store quite as well. Think of this, this is almost like sort of like an umbilical cord. Basically, you want it to kind of just like shrivel up and close on itself and that's going to protect this onion from different pathogens that are going to want to enter eventually once you cut this off. So the thinner that this is right now, the longer this onion, the longer the onion is going to store. You would think that, oh the bigger ones are going to store the longest, so I'll just hold on to these, hold on to those. I'll use the little ones up right away. Sometimes the little ones store the longest of all. So anyway, I'm just going to lay them out just like that. I'm not going to cut the tops off. That is the main thing if I had to say of the do not dos is do not cut the tops off and do not wash them. These onions are not going to see a drop of water as you know at all going forward. We're not going to need to wash them and do anything at all like that. There's a nice one. Look at that one right there. So anyway, I'm just going to go through. I'm going to pull all these up. I'm going to lay them down and then I'm going to come back in a couple days and show you what the next phase of this is going to be. So I'll see you there. All right guys, so I went ahead and fast forwarded a couple steps on you. So I want to tell you a little bit about what I've done so far and then where we're at right now. These onions were left out in the field for about three days and I realized something important that you're going to want to pay attention to. I had some red onions as well that I left out in the sun for a few days and what wound up happening was the temperature that week was really hot. It was in the mid 90s and the sun was out like full blast and the red onions I think because of the fact that they had darker skin on them attracted that much more heat into them and they sort of sat there and cooked a little bit. So they kind of got ruined but these guys did okay. I only left them out for I think three days but if you're going to go ahead and do that just make sure that your temperature is not super high and if it's a little bit cloudy or hazy out that's a better situation to be leaving them out in the field but don't leave them out in the brutal brutal hot sun like I did with my red ones at least. But anyway, they came out really nice. You can see what I went ahead and did after I pulled them out of the field as I set them up on these racks here. These are just some of the nursery racks that we use but you could use any type of ventilated shelving. There's wire shelves that you can get at the hardware store that are very similar to this but I just laid them out. They're pretty close but they're not too close and they've been inside of this garage here. I took them out. I rolled them out of the garage because I wanted to keep the air conditioned. I want to keep the cool temperature in there and the light doesn't really shine all that bright in there for filming sake. So I went ahead and rolled them out to show them to you guys. Now you would think at this stage it's been it's been almost two weeks now since I've set them up on these racks and inside that garage and you think that well they're pretty dried out go ahead and cut the tops off and the roots off. Well not just yet. There's a very important part that you want to pay attention to. The way you're going to be able to tell when it's time to cut the tops off is when you roll the stem with your fingers like this and what you're looking for is a little bit of like it almost feels like it's slimy on the inside. It's sort of slick almost like there's like like oil in there or something like that and if you're able to roll it back and forth and feel that that means that they're not quite ready yet. You want that to totally cure and dry out and shrivel up until there's nothing in here but just paper. If I were to go ahead and cut this off right now that sliminess and sort of you know that those tissues would just would just dry out really quickly and it would leave air gaps in there that pathogens could go ahead and enter. So I'm going to want to let them dry out totally and cure on their own until they get really pretty hard and brittle. It would almost feel like the way a like a straw when you take a you get a straw at a fast food store or something like that and you take it out of its paper. That paper sleeve is sort of what you want to be looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and roll these guys back in and I'm probably going to give them another week or two just to make sure that that all happens and that they're nice and clean and ready to go and when they are I will see you there. All right guys these onions have now been out of the ground for a full month now and they are totally cured and ready for the next step which is storage. The first thing you're going to want to do when it comes to storing is cut your tops off but be careful about how far off of the onion you cut your tops off depending on how you're going to store it and I'm going to explain that a little bit more in detail in a second. But here's my pruners for the sake of this onion we'll just cut the top off out here. You can take off any excess paper if you want the really super crispy outside shell parts and then you can trim the roots if you'd like to as well. That's not entirely necessary but be careful you don't cut too far into the onion when you do that or at all into the onion when you do that. Just when it comes to storage you've got a couple options. This I find is the quickest and easiest option. These are just produce bags that I got online they're about 10 cents a piece. If you get them I paid like 10 bucks for 100 of them and they're very quick and easy to just cut the roots off cut the tops off and then just throw them in there. If you got a little bit more time on your hands what you can do let me fish this back out is you can put them on a string like this. Just be careful that you don't load too many on one string because they do get very heavy fairly quickly but the way that you do this is very simple. I'm going to show you here on this side you just take a piece of string this is my good old jute twine that I use for all kinds of things in the garden. This piece of string is right about four feet long I'll just tie one end in it I'll loop it over something like that and then what you're going to want to do is cut your tops off a little bit longer you leave this tassel on there and that's going to help to uh to tie onto your string. Your very first onion is going to be like your anchor onion so you're going to want to wrap that around a few times that's what's going to hold sort of everything in place that's the very bottom you got that hanging there and then you just keep cutting the tops off about that long like I said you don't have to cut the roots off I don't but you can slide the top in between the string and then just sort of wrap it around just a few times is all it takes each onion that you stack on as you go up is going to wind up applying pressure and sort of keeping all this kind of tight and as you lay them on you'll see what I'm talking about they just kind of sort of naturally interlock amongst themselves and then the next one wrap it around below the onion like this and then just kind of let it fall in place wherever it wants to and you can keep doing this over and over and over again until so you get about up to here you don't want to overload this because when you go to pick it up and you don't want to have the string snap on you or anything but this is a neat way if you don't have nylon bags to store them in or netting bags to store them in or like coffee ground bags would be great too it's also really pretty if you wanted to hang that in a part of your kitchen or something that uh that didn't have a whole lot of sunlight that'd be great for that or great as gifts also but the general concept from here is they're going to get either put in the bags or they're going to get strung up like this and then they're going to go somewhere that's dark cool and has relatively good airflow you don't want to put them in like a bin underneath your kitchen counter in a cabinet somewhere you want them to have pretty good airflow and I keep them away from anything that they're going to spoil like potatoes bananas any kind of fruit really like like peaches or apples onions give off a good bit of gas even when they're cured and that gas is going to cause things to ripen a lot faster or even sprout in some cases if they're kept too close to onions or garlic so that's just something to keep in mind well that's my video on how to harvest store and cure your onions if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet please do because that helps me out a lot it bumps my videos up it gets in front of more eyes but for now thank you so much for watching this video I hope you liked it and I'll see you next time