No Tears Over Growing Onions

By Phran Novelli

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - I'd never grown any onions before, but a friend brought me some this spring and then I bought a pack of 50 'onion sets' for about 2 bucks and decided to plant those too. 'Onion sets' are what they call the starter plants - tiny bulblets with grassy leaves just a few inches long.

I planted them all in one big pot and later learned that oops - this so-called 'Candy onion' variety would get a lot bigger than bite-sized. When I realized they can become as big as baseballs, I thinned things out, and so we ate several of the sprouting onions as scallions in salads and replanted the rest into other pots.

As summer flew, the onions grew - their roots held them down and the green tops got taller while most of each of the bulging bulbs sat above the soil line. Late in August, the green tops started to flop and brown, signaling that it was time to harvest and let the onions dry.

Growing onions turned out to be easy! We've been enjoying the smaller sizes all summer and now have plenty of bigger onions to last through fall and into winter too.