Onions are Bolting! Is it the Heat?

[DriftlessRoots]

Way more of my onions are sending up flower spikes right now than usual. Way more. I got plants from Dixondale like I usually do and planted them on April 11. The varieties this year are Patterson and Redwing. The only variable that's different this year is that it feels like we've had some hot stretches earlier than usual and maybe more of them. I'm concerned they aren't going to keep as well.

Edit: Did some googling and, yup, it's the heat and nope, they won't keep well. Too late to do anything about it now but next year I'll know to water more often. Phooey.

[eyolf]

Last year a few of my potato onions bolted. I only had to about 2 dozen, and was interested in increasing the crop. I also had some onion sets bolting...something O generally see.

I left one of each color (red, white, and yellow) thinking I might get seeds on the multipliers, and I might get other colors of them.

Seed production wasn't great, but I got about 60 transplants in the garden. They're drying now: I have dark bronze bulbs, straw yellow (like mom) white, and two shades of red in multi-heart bulbs, plus about 20 that could be anything (not multiplier).

I'm so excited.

But, yeah, heat and drouth stress was the cause.

[habitat-gardener]

I plant my onion seedlings in November and they're usually harvested in May or June. So I thought it was ok to ignore them last week while I planted all my summer crops. The hot weather started this week, high 80s and 90s. And today I noticed several onions were sending up flowering stalks! It's probably been a couple weeks since I watered them, and the foliage is all still green with thick necks, but the onions look full size.

So is this crop a total loss, except for what I can put in the fridge and eat in a week? Or is there anything I can do to salvage more of it?

[Shule]

You can dehydrate the onions, and harvest the greens and young scapes (and dry and powder them). I've been wanting to make green onion powder for a long time, now.

I've never tried drying onions, either, but it sounds like they could be nice.

[karstopography]

I plant mine around Thanksgiving and harvest beginning in late April into May, all short day onions. I didn’t have a single one bolt out of roughly 140 onions. Short day onions like 1015 Legends will keep longer than generally advertised, certainly way longer than the month or two that often gets repeated here and there on garden related forums and websites site. I know a gardener locally that gets his to last to the following Thanksgiving from a May harvest, so about 6 months. He had a decent amount bolt this season. Last year I had a few bolt. I try to make sure the onions don’t ever dry out during the time they are growing. As far as the weather goes, nothing anyone can do about that. I’ve read bouts of cold then warmth will lead them to bolt. We got freezing weather about a month after my sets went in, 18° on two consecutive nights and close to freezing high temperatures two or three days in a row, with unholy wind. That weather actually killed some small percentage of the onions in my beds, other nearby gardens lost their whole crop.

We had a week of 80° weather in early January, another four or five days mid January around 80°. Cold weather late January through mid February, 10 days at or above 80° late in February, significant unusual warmth in March, twenty days with highs at or above 80° all the way to 87°, but none of the onions bolted then.

[GoDawgs]

Fluctuating hot and cold spells. Severity of bolting differs among varieties. That is why this is my last year growing onions and I'll stick to leeks and scallions. Ive tried a bunch of short day and neutral day varieties and it happens to all of them with the whipsaw weather we get in the spring. Done with it!

[pepperhead212]

This is my first year growing onions (and they aren't doing well at all), but I always grow shallots and scallions. And as soon as I see any flower stalks on shallots, I snip them off, and they continue growing well, and I never have a storage problem. But then, these aren't onions.