It’s time to place your onion seed orders. Our onion seeds are cleaned, tested, and on the shelf waiting for your order!
Onions and leeks need plenty of time to get to a nice, pencil-sized plant ready to go outside in early spring. Here in Hudson Valley, NY in zone 5 with a latest frost date of May 15th, we usually start our onions in the early part of February and plant them out in late April. While it’s great to start your onions with a little bottom heat just to get the seeds germinated, once they’re up the seedlings are fairly hardy. We heat our hoop house with a small wood stove to try to keep it above 25 degrees F at night, and the warmer your growing area, the faster the seedlings will grow. Keep in mind that you want plenty of light so that the seedlings don’t get too leggy. If your seedlings look leggy despite your best efforts, just give them a little “haircut” by trimming off some of the top of each seedling, leaving about 2 inches. These delicious trimmings can be used like chives!
The next seeds we’ll start to sow after the onions and leeks are long-growing warm-loving seedlings like eggplant and peppers, and also the first crops out in the garden–spinach, lettuces, peas, radishes, arugula, cilantro, beets, and other cool-weather crops that can take a light frost.
