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This onion season humbled me.
I grew two varieties of short-day onions this year: Texas Legend and Red Creole. I started my Texas Legends in January and my Red Creoles in February—which, as I now know, was too late.
The irony is that I delayed planting because winter looked harsh. Everything around me was slowing down or dying back. It felt wrong to start onions when the garden looked so dormant. I assumed the cold would hurt them.
But onions don’t think like that. They actually handle frost well, and survived frosts in January and February without issue. That’s when I realized: onions are meant to live through winter. They’re supposed to overwinter—settling in during the colder months so they can hit the ground running when spring arrives.
That’s the lesson I learned the hard way.
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SubscribeWith onions, success hinges on honoring the season.
You can fertilize, water consistently, amend your soil, and everything else required to grow a healthy vegetable. But if you miss the right planting window, you’re already behind.
Short-day onions—like Texas Legend and Red Creole—are ideal for gardeners in the Southern United States because they begin forming bulbs when daylight reaches around 10–12 hours per day.
That bulb-forming trigger is fixed. The onions don’t care whether your plants feel “ready.” Once that daylight threshold hits, they shift from leaf growth to bulb growth. Here’s the catch: the leaves play a part in determining the bulb size. The stronger and taller the leaves are before bulbing begins, the greater the potential for large onions.
My Red Creoles didn’t have enough time to build that leaf mass. By the time they got going, the daylight had already told them: time to bulb. So they did, but the bulbs were tiny. 😆
The good: my Texas Legends still produced a respectable harvest. They were started earlier, and it showed.
The bad: my Red Creoles were undersized. A direct consequence of planting too late.
The beautiful: the reminder that time matters more than almost everything else.
Nature has rhythms! You can work hard, try to outsmart the process (like me) by optimizing nutrients and watering schedules. But sometimes success simply comes down to respecting the calendar. That’s humbling lol and that’s one of the reasons I garden. Every season teaches something, and this one taught me that some things can’t be rushed.
Next year, my onions will get planted in November, no matter how cold it looks outside!
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