[GoDawgs]

Originally Posted by peebee

Yes Fathers Daughter, I plan to eat them in salads too! In fact I ate my first one today and it was delish! But now I'm on a mission to learn all I can about sweet onions, which varieties are very sweet, etc and I will try to find seeds too. Maybe I will do a new post asking for everyone's favorites. Thank you!

One thing to keep in mind is what "day length" the onions are. A good explanation from Willhite Seed in Texas (an old copy I made from 2015, not on their site any longer):

Choose the Right Onion for Your Latitude. Day length is the signal that tells most onions that it's time to stop growing vegetatively -- putting growth into forming leaves -- and time to start forming a bulb. Long day varieties of onions need exposure to 14 to 16 hours of daylight to bulb up. These onions grow well north of 35 degrees latitude, or approximately above a line drawn through northern North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona to central California. These are the onions that are grown for summer harvest in the northern half of the country. They are planted in early spring, putting on vegetative growth until the lengthening days of early summer trigger bulb formation. Long day onions generally have a pungent flavor and store well.

"South of 35 degrees latitude, with its shorter summer day lengths, gardeners need to grow short day onion varieties, ones that form bulbs when the days are 10 to 12 hours long. Short day onions are planted in the fall in the south and grown through the winter for spring harvest or sown in very early spring. Some of the well-known sweet onions are short day varieties. Because of their higher water content, most short day onions do not store well and are best for fresh eating."

"Modern plant breeding has produced intermediate day, or day neutral, onion varieties. These varieties aren't as sensitive to day length and bulb up well in response to 12 to 14 hour days. They grow well across a broad range of the country. Intermediate day onions are usually planted in the spring."

I'm latitude 33.36. It seems that while seed companies sell lots of long day varieties, the list of short days and intermediates is short. I've had success here with fall-planted Australian Brown (from Baker Creek), a regular-type intermediate onion. The sweet Granex Yellow (think Vidalia) grows so slowly for me so I'm still working on sweets. I'd like to try the Texas 1015Y, a big Texas sweet that's traditionally planted Oct 15, hence the name.

So far it seems that with our on and off winter spells of cold/warm, a lot of varieties bolt in this garden. Australian Brown has only done that once to me. This year only three of those onions bolted which surprised me a ton as we had a lot of cold/warm/cold spells.

Trial and error will be probably your best guide. It will be interesting to see what varieties others suggest as I'm still looking too.