Why Onions?

 By Farmer Richard with Gwen Anderson

Red Cipollini Onions drying in the Greenhouse

Onions were one of the first vegetables that came to Richard’s attention as having significant health benefits.  Four years ago, we published an article called Alliums to Fight Cancer that delved into some of the health benefits of onions and garlic specifically regarding their cancer fighting properties. Onions also boast the ability to help prevent osteoporosis, lower blood pressure, lower the level of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood, have anti-clotting benefits, as well as being anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and antiviral. This is due largely to the organosulfur compounds that onions contain.  Organosulfur compounds contain some powerful antioxidants, including quercetin and other flavonoids that encourage glutathione production.  Quercetin is known to slow tumor growth, especially in colon cancer, promote prostate health, and is an antihistamine.  Flavonoids may reduce the risk of stroke as well as Parkinson’s and cardiovascular disease.  One study done by the Journal of Hypertension in 2017 reported that participants that consistently ate more alliums (onions and garlic, to name a few) reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 64%.  Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that boosts the immune system and protects the heart as well as removing toxins.  Sulfur, found in organosulfur compounds, is also the main component that assists with protein synthesis and creating cell structures.

Onion field from June this year

The organosulfur compounds are most beneficial when raw, but you can maximize the benefit of cooked onions (and garlic, too!) by allowing them to set for 10 minutes after cutting them before cooking them.  This process allows the enzymes released by the onions while being cut to fully react with the sulfur-containing molecules, converting them into their beneficial forms.  Aside from the organosulfur compounds, onions are also an excellent source of vitamin C and phytonutrients.  Phytonutrients help overall in maintaining good health and contain anticancer and antimicrobial properties.  Onions also contain fiber and folic acid, a B vitamin that helps make healthy new cells.  They are low calorie, very low in sodium, and have no fat or cholesterol.

Egyptian Walking Onion

It was over 40 years ago when Richard first learned about the health benefits of onions.  Since then, he has persisted in finding varieties of onion that can be available year round locally, allowing us to eat some form of onion every day.  Besides the huge health benefits, onions add flavor to almost every meal.  Our goal is to have one or more members of the onion/garlic family in every box of our 30 box season.  We start the season with perennial chives and two multiplying heirloom onions, potato onions and Egyptian Walking Onions, as well as the wild ramps harvested from our woods.  These meet our onion needs until our grown-from-seed transplants are ready.  We grow about 379,000 onion plants in our greenhouses, starting in late February, and transplant them to the field in early April when they are ready for the move

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We are presently delivering the very fast growing sweet Spanish type called Zoey in this week’s CSA boxes.  The very fast growing Spanish varieties, including Sierra Blanca which we delivered previously, are very mild, even when raw.  The later, slower growing varieties allow us to store onions for six months or more!  These storage onions have a stronger flavor than the earlier varieties when raw, due to the higher amount of sulfur compounds, which also aid in storage.  When cooked, much of the sulfur volatilizes and leaves us with a sweet caramelized onion flavor.  This is because onions also contain a high amount of sugar, which becomes more pronounced when the sulfur compounds break down.

Green Scallions planted on raised beds with reflective plastic mulch.

Onions are sometimes challenging to grow because they grow slowly and are poor weed competitors.  They also have a tiny insect pest called the onion thrip that lives in the growth point of the onion.  The thrips pierce tiny holes in the young leaves, which allows bacteria to enter the plant.  That bacteria can later cause a soft rot in the top of a mature dry onion.  To solve these problems we plant our tiny greenhouse onion plants into a raised bed covered with a reflective plastic mulch that prevents the thrips from finding the onions.  It works!  Without the thrips, we have almost no neck rot, even in a wet, stormy year.

Onions require regular water to thrive.  Our onions received water with fertilizer that includes sea weeds, micro and macro nutrients and beneficial bacteria through the line buried under each row at least once a week.  Our irrigation/fertigation crew did a great job this year.  Alejandro also did regular foliar applications to provide additional nutrients and for disease prevention.  The result: a record yield with excellent quality that should supply all boxes through December and still allow produce plus for your winter stash!  This year’s crop appears to be our best ever!

Red Onions and Shallots safely drying in the greenhouse

Last week, we did a big onion and shallot harvest.  Of our 1.8 acres of onions, two-thirds are safely stored in the greenhouse and cooler right now.  We hope to finish the harvest later this week or early next week.  We estimate the total yield form this crop will equate to about 9 onions in each box for the remainder of the season!  The harvest so far has been abundant, as it was earlier this season with the early purple and green scallions and then purple Cipollini onions we delivered.  We bring onions in from the field when there is still some green in the top.  To leave them in the field longer risks sun burn on hot days and bacteria entering the neck.  We hand pull all of our onions when ready for harvest, then leave them to dry briefly in the field.  After a day or two, the onions are crated, hauled back to the farm and organized onto our greenhouse benches to finish drying.  The greenhouse roof is now covered with an 85% opaque cloth, which helps shade the onions from direct sunlight and reduces the temperature in the greenhouse.  After 1-2 weeks of drying, we top and clean the onions before transferring them to a cold, dry cooler for storage.

Shallots drying in the greenhouse

Our production system involves a great deal of manual labor!  Conventional onion production involves nasty neonicotinoid systemic insecticides to control the thrips.  Neonicotinoids are an insecticide that has been linked to many adverse human health and ecological effects, including decimating the honey bee and bird populations.  Conventional producers also use a mechanical topper to top and clean onions.  We have a mechanical topper, but find that it causes damage to the onion, so we chose to top them by hand instead.

While growing onions is challenging and labor intensive, we firmly believe the benefits of providing them year round makes the challenge well worth the effort.  We hope you have gained a greater appreciation for the health powerhouse that is the onion.

Growing Onions at Harmony Valley Farm

By Farmer Richard

We have long felt that onions, and the related families of garlic and ramps, are essential to good health and should be eaten daily.  Thus, we consider onions to be a staple vegetable and plan to include some type of onion/garlic selection in every box throughout the course of our CSA season.  This is quite a feat, but we’ve been able to include some perennial and foraged crops such as chives and ramps that allow us to get our weekly onion selection until our overwintered scallions are ready. We plant onion sets and onion tops in the fall for our Egyptian walking onions and potato onions.  These are both multiplier onions that are established in the fall, continue their growth cycle the following spring and are ready for harvest ahead of any spring planted onions.   Next are the first spring scallions which are planted into the field in April from transplants we grow from seed in our greenhouses.  Once we’ve moved through the scallions, we continue with our seasonal progression and harvest an early fresh purple cipollini onion called Desert Sunrise.  This usually brings us to about the end of June when some of our early sweet Spanish onions are big enough to harvest.  Due to their high sugar content, they are an excellent choice for eating fresh as they are pretty mild.  Unfortunately, they don’t store very well.  That’s ok though, because they come in ahead of our storage onions and fill the mid-season slot very nicely.  Once we’ve moved through the sweeter Spanish type onions, we turn to our red and yellow storage onions to take us through the latter part of the season and through the winter.  Yes, it’s a challenge to pull this off, but if you look back over this year and previous years, you’ll find that we’re able to achieve this lofty goal most of the time!

We eat a lot of onions in our household, using them at least once a day if not more.  They often provide the background flavor base for our meals and we include them in everything from our scrambled eggs in the morning to soup, salads, etc.  We do believe onions play an important role in health and value our daily dose of nutrients from this food.  Onions contain powerful antioxidants, many of which are sulfur compounds.  These antioxidants play a role in overall health and immunity and benefit the body with their anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory properties.  They are also thought to play a role in cancer prevention as well as a whole host of other health benefits.  Eating onions raw may be slightly better than cooked, but onions in any form are beneficial.

Onions starting life in the greenhouse this March.

There are some challenges to growing onions, but I’m always up for a good farming challenge!  We start onions and shallots from seed in the greenhouse late in February.  We plan to take care of them for at least 7-8 weeks before they are transplanted into the field.  They are the first crop transplanted in early April.  They can survive snow and cold to 20° F!  While we don’t have to worry about weed pressure in the greenhouse, we are thinking about how to control weeds in the field.  Because of their slim, round stem, onions are poor weed competitors.  Plants that have a wide leaf are able to shade the ground and deprive weeds of valuable sunlight.  Onions grow upright and their tops don’t provide much shade, thus weed control can be a challenge.  They are one of the first crops to need hand weeding and we have found we have to make this job a priority so we have a clean field before we divert our crew time to picking strawberries and peas.

Twenty years ago we planted our spring onion transplants into flat bare ground.  If we managed to keep the weeds out, they grew well.  However, we faced another challenge presented by a tiny little insect called an onion thrip.  This little creature pierced small holes deep in the center growth point of the plant where organic insecticides offered limited control and protection.  The onion thrip is very difficult even for conventional growers, so they have gone to using 100% systemic insecticides, mainly neonicotinoids that make every part of the plant toxic.  It works well to control the thrips, but do we want to eat a toxic plant?

 

Our onions grown in the flat ground would look good until we brought them into the greenhouse to dry.  After drying and cleaning, we found a soft rot in the neck and top of the onion and often a bad rotting ring somewhere in the onion.  We went to the extension service and had the disease identified by plant pathology and asked what we could do.  The answer was to grow on raised beds.  Heavy rain events on small onions make them vulnerable to getting bacteria inside the center of the onion.  The bacteria causes rot on the inside layers of the onion but appears to be fine from the exterior.  We only see the damage after some time in storage or when we cut them open to use them!  The same is true with another onion disease called neck rot.  Bacteria enter the neck and develop during curing, and often go unnoticed until the end user cuts it open!  This all points back to thrip damage that created the entry point to allow the bacteria to enter!

Raised beds?  How do we do that?  This is not a garden.  We figured it out.  We built equipment to create a 6-8 inch raised bed with a smooth top to plant or transplant all our crops on.  Now, most of our crops, onions included, are planted on raised beds.  The raised bed allows excess water to run off the bed into the lower wheel track between beds and careful ditching at the lower ends of fields prevents the water saturation that would cause onions to later rot.  With this new system, the quality of our onions improved!  But we still had the onion thrips piercing holes that allowed disease bacteria to enter the neck.

Onion transplanting crew, putting the little onions in the
raised beds with the reflective plastic mulch.

Next, we found a reflective plastic mulch that we could use to cover the beds.  It is shiny like aluminum foil and when the sun shines on it the reflection off the mulch disorients thrips and totally deters them from entering the field and onion plants.  We found that this technique also works for other insects on other crops!  So we covered our raised bed with reflective plastic and the high and dry onions without the thrip damage were better than ever!

Did I mention that growing onions has some challenges?  The raised, plastic covered bed has 2 drip tapes buried under 4 rows of onions.  With the help of water sensors we found the onions need lots of water, sometimes we have to irrigate twice per week when it is hot.  Each time we water the onions, we can also give them some fertilizer through the drip lines to provide the nutrients and nitrogen they need to produce well.

The sum total of our efforts allows us to prevent thrip damage to produce healthy onions.  We do still need to manage the harvest and try to bring them in with some green still remaining in the tops. We put them into our shade covered greenhouses to allow them to dry down, cure and set skins for longterm storage.  We are now able to have disease free onions that produce yields comparable to conventional yields but without using systemic poison!

Last year's onions drying in the greenhouse.

Once the onions are dry, we choose to top and clean all our onions and shallots by hand.  It takes time, trimming the top off of every onion with a scissors, but we think it is worth it for a pristine appearance.  Mechanical means of topping onions can cause injury to the onion which then can limit their ability to store well.

As you can see, onions are very important at Harmony Valley Farm and we have a very good crop this year.  We plan to keep you supplied with onions weekly until our CSA delivery season ends.  If you get behind and they start building up on your counter, don’t worry. If you store them properly they will keep well for quite awhile.  Keep them in a cool, dry location out of direct sunlight.  When the season ends, we’ll give you an opportunity to order more onions, shallots and red cipollini onions to supply your pantry through the winter!  Display your onions proudly in your kitchen, eat them daily and enjoy being healthy.