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I rewatched a video on overwintering alliums and took notes this time. Then I was perusing varieties on rareseeds and saw Long Day. I know I've heard the terms long day, short day years ago but had forgotten all about it. Did a search and that ended up putting me on Johnny's website.

For a few seconds, the map made no sense but then I realized closer to the equator/sun is different than the angled rotational path of the sun. Missouri is intermediate but the onion seeds I was looking at say "Long day (potentially intermediate)" and they grew good at Baker Creek which is 100 miles South of me so they'll work.

Selecting veggies based on ease of slicing. Some may call it lazy. I prefer utilitarian.

Speaking of sun. I'm having tomato issues. Not getting many and they're slow to ripen. Last year I had shade cloth over the W/NW facing back half of the little garden to give afternoon shade. This year I did it over the whole garden thinking about last two years of near 100 degrees for weeks on end. If it was 20-30% shade cloth it would probably be fine but it's 40% iirc. Peppers are along the South end so they're doing great. Live and learn.

Off to do some more astronomical onion learning.

I find Stuttgarter to be very good long storage onions. I’m still using some of them.

But even better is this red onion variety.

Rossa di Milano
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetables/onions/full-size-onions/rossa-di-milano-organic-onion-seed-3454G.html

Plus they are open pollinated so they seeds will breed true and you can save them.

My plan for onions is to every year let a batch go to seed.

This year, some of the Stuttgarters. Next year I’ll do the Milano’s.

I know we are told that onion seeds are only viable for one year, but the year before last I found some onion seeds that were two years old, this was their second year. So I sowed the whole bunch of them, and boy, did I ever get a lot of plants!

I don’t know how much the germination was affected, but I sure got all the plants I needed.

The beauty of saving your own seeds is that you can have far more than you need and of course, they are free!