Growing Japanese Onions from seed is, I think, time sensitive and I sow between the 14 and 18 of August. Is that the right time?

Growing onions from seed
This video shows a great method for sowing onions. I may try doing similar for my Japanese onions - but I will sow the seed in August.

2006

Thursday 17th August 2006. In early spring I made a trip the garden centre with Geoff to buy posts and while I was there bought a packet of Huckleberry seed. There was a picture on the front of the packet showing a green leaved plant with black berries on it. They were new to me but I thought maybe worth a try so I bought a packet of seed. I gave the seed to John who was master of the greenhouse at the time and getting a whole load of vegetables seedlings going. John got a great germination rate and from the one packet of seeds we had loads to plants to deal with. We planted out a row of small plants giving them some muck underneath and from time to time gave them a few cans of water during June and July as it hardly rained at all in those two months. They seemed to grow fairly well despite the lack of rain and eventually had small star shaped white flowers and small green berries that turned blacker as they grew larger. At two feet I gave them a mulch of compost when I was sowing nearby. At two feet high I thought the plants were as tall as they going to get but the last two weeks of rain has given them a real boost and they have sprouted out in all directions and are now nearly twice the size they were.

http://www.huckleberries.org/

http://homecooking.about.com/library/weekly/blhuckbery.htm

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/300-399/nb311.htm

http://berrygrape.oregonstate.edu/fruitgrowing/berrycrops/huckleberry/growing.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/niffgurd/tags/huckleberry/

Saturday 13 August 2006, in contrast to June and July when it hardly rained at all, August has so far turned out to be a wet month. I have finished planting out leeks now.

Took more cuttings from the Hebes and the blue Abutilon.

Sunday 14th August 2006 Sowed more Spinach, Rocket, and Radish seed.

I’m still working on preparing a new bed under my second large old eating apple tree to move the snowdrops to next year. So far this year I have dug the ground over several times removing the bindweed on each occasion and now I am barrowing the remains of my muck heap up there and digging that in along with some of the verbascum plants that have flowered earlier this year. I see this as another way of using the Verbascum as green manure and hopefully putting in some slow rotting material for the snowdrops to get their roots into. (What the snowdrops would really like is some old wrotten wood to get their roots into.)

2005

Sowed Japanese onion seed at the end of a rainy day in perfectly moist soil. My seedling plum turns out to be very similar to a Victoria plum although the plum stone planted was from the greengage tree they seem to have no trace of greengage in them at all. However they are nice enough plums on a vigorous strong growing tree. The other tree from the same batch of plum stones hasn't cropped at all yet although it has flowered for the last two years.

2004

The Victoria plums are cropping really well this year.

2002

Sunday 18th August We have just had a hot dry spell so I have left sowing the Japanese onion seed to the end of my target sowing time (14th to the 18th august). The soil was as dry as dust so the hose pipe was required for a good drenching after sowing. I needn't have bothered two hours later we had a thunder storm and a good drenching of rain.

Planted out the last of this years calabrese broccoli

2000

Saturday 18th August. Fortunately the ground that was dug and weeded earlier in the week, when it was dry and dusty and easy to work, is now, after a hard rain yesterday, in perfect condition for sowing seed. Senshyu and Imai Yellow are the two Japanese onion seed that I'm sowing this year. I find them a particularly successful crop (and apart from the weeding requirements) easy to grow. They are a fairly mild flavoured onion that crop early in the summer and have to be eaten before Christmas, as they won't keep through the winter.