Strawberries, Onions, and Garlic

Believe it or not, Southern California gardeners, it's time to plant Strawberries, onions, and garlic for successful harvests next year. The following is from Pat Welsh's Southern California Organic Gardening (3rd Edition): Month by Month (a book we highly recommend).

The Secret Lives of Strawberries and Onions. Strawberries and onions seem at first glance to be an unlikely pair to lump together for discussion, but they share certain characteristics. In order to grow an abundant harvest of large, luscious strawberries and premium globe onions, you have to understand some of their innate secrets. Both are regional crops—that is, varieties of each are designed to be grown in certain Plant globe onions only from seeds, never from sets (small bulbs). Plant only such “short-day” (southern) varieties as ‘Grano’,‘Granex’, and ‘Crystal Wax’; put the seeds in the ground between the first and tenth of November or plant these varieties bare root in January). .... Also plant garlic now. Purchase large globes with good-sized sections in any market, or elephant garlic at the nursery or produce market. (It’s a different species, and milder, but grown much the same way.) Break up the garlic cloves and plant them individually, with the points facing up, in fertile soil rich in humus. Plant them in full sun, 4 inches apart and 2 inches beneath the soil surface.

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geographical areas and not in others. Both have specific temperature requirements that, for best results, require their being planted during an identical and extremely short slice of time—sometime between November 1 and 10—though they require this schedule for somewhat different reasons. Exhaustive tests by the University of California Agricultural Extension, paid for by strawberry growers, have proven that strawberries planted between November 1 and 10 get winter chill at the precise moment in their growing schedule to trigger fruit production rather than foliage. When planted at the wrong time they’ll put out runners but won’t produce much, if any, fruit. (Watch any professional strawberry growers near you as a good indication of when to plant.) Either plant runners from your own garden that you’ve already prepared as prechilled, bare-root plants (as discussed on page 362) or plant from bare-roots purchased from nurseries now. (See the box on page 383 for planting instructions.) As a general rule, don’t order strawberries, other than alpine varieties, from catalogs, because they usually don’t carry varieties that are adapted to our climate. Strawberries are a highly regional crop—even more so than onions. Just a few hundred miles up the California coast entirely different strawberry varieties are grown, so be sure that you plant a locally adapted variety, such as ‘Camarillo’,‘Douglas’,‘Sequoia’,‘Tioga’, or ‘Tufts’. Onions are photothermoperiodic—that is, they’re sensitive to temperature and also to day length. An onion plant is stimulated to stop making leafy growth and to start making a bulb not so much by temperature as by the lengthening of days, as the sun moves north in spring and summer. Each variety will form a bulb only after it has received a certain number of hours of daylight each day for a certain number of days. However, varieties vary greatly in the number of hours of daylight they need. Accordingly, all onions are categorized into long-day (northern), intermediate-day (central), and short-day (southern) varieties. Long-day varieties, grown in northern states and in Canada, need fourteen to fifteen hours of daylight to make a bulb. Northern European and Alaskan varieties need sixteen hours or more. No long-day varieties can possibly receive enough hours of daylight in Southern California to make a bulb. If you plant them your crop will always fail, and yet you can often find seeds of long-day onions on local seed racks, and almost all onion sets are of long-day types. These sets can be used only for growing scallions (green onions). Here, in order to get the best globe onions, we must plant seeds of short-day (southern) varieties in fall or, alternatively, plant intermediate varieties in late winter. Also, once an onion has reached a certain critical size, which differs by variety, temperatures of between 40° and 50°F will make it go to seed prematurely, or bolt. The way to grow good bulb onions here and avoid bolting is to follow this Rule of Thumb: