I have never put that much effort into onions. Wisconsin grows SO MANY ONIONS (and potatoes and carrots and other root crops) that they’re always cheap and plentiful to me. The entire center of our state is ‘Sandy Loam.’ Toss a tater in, get a zillion of them back, LOL!
When I DO grow onions, I just buy the bags of mixed bulbs at Walmart or the Hardware Store.
I have learned that in our quest for self-sufficiency, not EVERYTHING needs to start 100% from scratch.
Have you read: ‘Make the Bread, Buy the Butter?’ It’s a great book showing the economics of things we should do ourselves and things that are better off to buy at market or locally if possible.
It opened my eyes and has saved me a lot of work and heartache - because some things I’m just not good at!
https://www.amazon.com/Make-Bread-Buy-Butter-Shouldnt/dp/1451605889
The situation I ran into was the red onion I like the best, which is a beautiful onion and stores very well, is Rossa DiMilano, and is available only as seeds. I have not found them sold as onion sets yet.
So I thought I’d try to get my own sets started from seed.
I guess the other option is to try to either start the seeds even earlier next winter, like the end of Jan/beginning of Feb so the plants can get to a decent size before putting them out, and waiting a bit longer and not trying to jump the gun and getting them in as early as possible.
I have a few left in the seed starting trays that I didn’t have room for that I thought I’d use if I needed to replace any loss. I just didn’t expect that much loss. Those ones in the trays seem to be a decent size, but boy, they sure do take a long time to grow.
I’ve also heard of winter sowing them, but never tried that either, but am considering it.
I think I figured out what happened.
I had to cover the seedlings because the weather got REALLY cold and I wasn’t sure they’d make it, and probably bent them over.
Them bending over signals to them to stop growing. Well, I still have a bunch of the red ones left from last year and I guess I’ll grab the smallest of them and plant them to save the seed instead of buying them again this year.