Types of Onions to Plant This Year
When I think about what onions I’m going to plant each year, I think about two things. First, what I want to use them for. And second, which ones are best suited for my location?
Here are the types of onions I have grown successfully in Southern California. Plus I’ll share a few favorites for my northern gardeners as well.
Types of Onions Uses in the Kitchen
First, let’s knock out the easy part. Well, I think it’s the easy part. Here’s a list of each type of onion and what I think it’s best used for when cooking.
Yellow Onions
This is the standard cooking onion. It’s pretty good all around if you’re cooking anything.
Best Uses: Carmelizing
My Favorite Varieties: Texas Early Grano (Short Day Onion)
Sweet Onions
These are a yellow onion on the inside, but have a more mild onion flavor and are slightly sweeter than their yellow counterparts.
Best Uses: Salads, Relishes, Garnishes
My Favorite Varieties: Walla Walla, Vidalia Yellow Granex (Short Day Onions), Yellow Sweet Spanish (Long Day Onion)
Red Onions
These onions are more peppery.
Best Uses: Salads, Grilling, Roasting, Pickling
My Favorite Varieties: Flat of Italy, Cabernet (Intermediate Day Onions)
White Onions
These are my go-to onions for potato or macaroni salads. I also like to grill them and serve them as a side to other items.
Best Uses: Prepared Salads, Latin Dishes, Grilling
My Favorite Varieties: Gladstone (Intermediate Day Onion)
Shallots
A lot of recipes call for shallots. If an onion and a garlic had a baby, it would taste like a shallot in my opinion.
Best Uses: Sauces, Dressings, Side Dish for Steak
My Favorite Varieties: Zebrune Shallots (Long Day Onion)
Scallions
I cook a lot of Asian and Latin cuisine around our house and I often toss in scallions to those dishes. These are those pretty green onion bunches that you see at the grocer.
Best Uses: Stir Fries, Stews, Asian and Latin Dishes, Garnishes
My Favorite Varieties: Tokyo Long White, White Lisbon Bunching Scallions
Sunlight and Onions
Onions are especially sensitive to photoperiodism, which is the response they have to daylight. This sensitivity greatly affects whether or not an onion will grow large bulbs, or any bulb at all (the part that we eat).
Onions are divided into three categories based on how much sunlight is ideal for them to grow full-size bulbs. Those categories are short-day, intermediate-day, and long-day.
For most of the South (where I live) the length of our summer days doesn’t vary much from the length of our winter days. And these zones typically are warmer with mild winters. Short-day onions do best here.
And while it may seem counterintuitive at first, places like Alaska, Canada, and northern states have better success with long-day onions because they have longer days in the summer than they do in winter.
But the closer you get to the equator, the less variation there is in daylight. I’ll break down all three types next. But know that sunlight is very important to onions.
Short Day Onions
Short day onions require 10 to 12 hours of sunlight each day to form a full-size bulb. They also do better in mild winter climates and are often grown in the South throughout the winter and early spring.
I like to think of zone 7 and warmer for short-day onions.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t grow short-day onions in the north, but I’ve been told by my gardener friends up there that the bulbs don’t get as large.
Short day onions can take anywhere from 100 to 160 days to mature. However, in northern states, most people only grow them for about 75 days and then harvest them due to the climate.
Some of my favorite short-day onions include the Yellow Granex (the famous Vidalia onion of Georgia) and the Texas Early Grano which is an heirloom variety.
I have found that short-day onions grown here in Southern California are less susceptible to bolting which can reduce the size and quality of the bulb.
Short Day Onions grow best in locations south of San Francisco and Washington D.C. If you were to draw a line across the country connecting those two cities, you’d be pretty close to identifying where short-day onions grow best.
Intermediate Day Onions
Intermediate-day onions require 12 to 14 hours of sunlight each day to form full-size bulbs. However, I’ve found that you can grow these pretty well here in Southern California too even though we’re technically not in the intermediate zone.
Many people in USDA zones 5 and 6 grow these types of onions. If you’re in the middle of the US, these grow well, but you can grow them in long-day and short-day zones.
In the south, we plant them in early fall and they grow through our mild winter. In the north, most people plant them in early spring.
The thing I like about intermediate-day onions is that many of the ones I like mature a lot faster than most other varieties. I like to grow the Flat of Italy which is a red onion that matures in about 70 days.
Some of my other favorite intermediate-day onions include Red Cabernet, Monastrell, and Gladstone which is a white onion.
Long Day Onions
Long day onions require 15 to 16 hours of sunlight per day so they fare really well in northern regions with long summer days. I suppose they would do really well in the Southern Hemisphere too when we have our winters because they too would have long days.
Most people north of San Francisco and Washington D.C. grow long-day onions - think zones 6 or colder. In these regions, onions are planted in late winter or early spring and can take anywhere from 100 to 130 days to mature.
But this doesn’t mean that you can’t grow long-day onions in the South though. I live in Southern California and I’ve grown Walla Walla and Yellow Sweet Spanish onions with good results.
The only catch was that the long-day onions took longer before I harvested them (about 30 days).
