Dobies have lots of onion sets avaiable.
An onion set is really a small onion bulb.
You can grow onions from seed but most people start with sets as it’s a head start!
One of the most important things with onions is to keep the patch well weeded. You can hoe the ground if you have planted the onions far enough apart in even lines. You’ll appreciate the accuracy needed once you come to hoe! Get a piece of wood cut to the right length for distance and put in a string line to keep them in a neat row.
You plant them with the pointy end up and just showing through. You can cover the area to stop birds pulling them out until they’re rooted. Use mesh or net. The tiny bit of stem showing will look very interesting to birds that like worms which tempts them into pulling them up!
Plant normally in March or April. But read the instructions that come with the onion sets.
If your onions start to develope a flower stem then cut this out immediately as it saps the strength of the plant and means it doesn’t put it’s energy into growing the bulb!
The week before you grow after you’ve weeded and raked the bed you should apply some fish, blood & bone or Growmore fertiliser to the patch. Rake in.
You can use the onions straight from the garden – or if you want to store them you need to let the stems fall over on their own and then it’s time to lift them up and ideally let them sit in the sun outside for a few days to dry off. If the weather turns wet though you’re best drying them in a shed or in the greenhouse. Brush the mud and broken leaves off and then cut the long stems off. You can learn to tie them up into strings if you get the chance too and then this makes storing them easy. Otherwise store in a flat box and keep an eye on them!
Easy to grow and idea for beginners. Success rate guaranteed by starting with a set not a seed. Apart from the birds at the beginning being a nuisance (Just replant any that get pulled up) and they should do well.
Some people use the same bed again and again for onions. It’s up to you whether you do. Crop rotation says you really shouldn’t though.

Autumn Planting Onion, Shallot and Garlic Collection £9.99
It’s the perfect time to plant over-wintering onions & shallots and garlic to harvest next summer. This collection gives you 200g of Dobies Autumn Champion Onion Sets, 400g of Shallot Griselle and 2 bulbs of Garlic Illico, saving you £2.16 PLUS we’ll give you 200g of Onion Senshyu Yellow – an extremely popular Japanese over-wintering onion that produces a heavy crop of excellent bulbs – worth £2.45 FREE.Autumn Champion is a fine onion, mildish in flavour and a little more robust than others due to its slightly higher dry matter content.Griselle has a reputation as being the finest tasting of all shallots and we’re sure that its robust spicy taste will not disappoint.Illico is a very early-maturing hardneck garlic, producing bulbs that are mainly white with some pale purple colouring.This offer will set your taste buds tingling! Full growing instructions included. October

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