Home-grown onions taste better than store-bought

The middle of March is the time to plant onions and sweet corn.

Onions are planted from small transplants. Many onion transplants can be started from seed the previous October or they can be ordered online from places such as Dixondale Farms in Texas .

Don’t worry about getting short day, long day or intermediate (referring to daylight hours); they all work at our latitude including Vidalia, Walla Walla and Sweet Georgia Browns. Some of my favorites have been Texas Super Sweet and Yellow Granex in the short-day category and Big Daddy and Walla Walla in the long-day category. One of my all-time favorites is Candy and don’t forget Super Star.

Why grow onions when you can buy them in the store? Because they taste so much better — unbelievably better. You can’t go wrong with any of those I recommended provided you have prepared your soil ahead of time. I like the soil prepared well enough so that you can dig in it with your hands. Not that you have to, it’s just an indicator that the soil was prepared enough.

I like raised bed gardening without sidewalls. In other words, you do not have to put up cinder blocks or build a large coffin to make a raised bed. Raised beds can be formed using the natural slope of the soil at the edges .

I posted instructions on building raised beds on my blog last year; you can search for them on the Internet .

Generally, raised beds are about 1 yard wide and as long as you like. Walkways between the beds are about half a yard wide. You should have enough spaces for vegetables so you can rotate your vegetables to different spots each year. This helps keep pests and diseases from going rampant in your garden.

Growing the same vegetables, or vegetables of the same family, in the same spot year after year is a big no-no. Rotation each year is a primary principle of basic vegetable gardening. I will post the vegetable families for planning a three-year rotation on this week’s blog.

Q: I have two large mesquite trees in my yard and both drop huge quantities of seed pods annually. I have heard that mesquites can be sprayed with the same chemical used on olive trees to prevent them from setting fruit. If so, what is the optimal time of year to spray, what is the name of the spray and can I purchase it at my local nursery?

A: Theoretically you can. The problem is two-fold. Technically the chemical falls under the label requirements for a pesticide even though it really doesn’t kill a pest. Because it is categorized as a pesticide, it falls under the legalities of pesticide use.

If mesquite trees and the purpose of preventing seed pod formation are not on the label, no one can legally recommend it for that use or it violates federal law.

Second , to prevent pod formation from the flowers you would need to know the right timing and dosage to get results. Neither appear on the label to my knowledge. If someone were to attempt to control the pods, that person would have to “guesstimate” what the right concentration would be (how many tablespoons or teaspoons per gallon, for instance) and the right stage in flower and pod formation to make the application.

Some of these chemicals have to be applied only when the flowers are open. Since the flowers don’t all open at the same time, the tree would have to be sprayed multiple times.

Some types of chemicals that cause flower drop, or prevent pod or fruit formation, have to actually land inside the flowers to cause the flower, pod or fruit to abort. Other chemicals can be sprayed before flowering, taken up by the plant systemically.

So even if I was legally permitted to tell you to try it, I would not know what concentration to use unless it is stated on the label .

You should be aware that some of these products can damage or even kill other plants if the spray were to land on them. So theoretically it will probably work but I am not recommending it.

Q: Every year my grapes on my Thompson seedless grape vine are small, about the size of a large pea. The taste is wonderful but I would like to get the berries larger. I understand that grape growers use a chemical to make them larger but I would rather not use chemicals if I don’t have to.

A: Getting better berry size on grapes means you have to reduce the number of berries on the vine. The berries are small because there are too many berries for the size of the plant.

The first step is to reduce the number of grape bunches or clusters on the vine. Grape clusters are produced on last year’s growth. If you look at your vine, you will see that last year’s growth will be a lighter or a reddish brown compared to older growth.

Once last year’s growth has been identified, then it must be cut back to reduce the number of bunches the vine has to produce. If the grape is trellised, it is much easier to see where and how much to prune .

On a trellised vine, you want fruit production about 12 inches apart. If you haven’t finished your grape pruning, you still have time. You should be finished before you see new leaves emerge.

There are two ways of pruning grapes: spur pruning and cane pruning. Spurs are created by cutting back last year’s growth so that only one or two buds remain. This means last year’s growth is reduced to an inch or less .

Spur pruning is done to most grapes. However, if you spur prune a Thompson seedless grapevine, it is possible you may lose most of your fruit. This is because the first 10 buds or so on last year’s growth will not produce grape bunches. They are fruitless. In Thompson seedless, spur pruning cuts off buds that produce grape bunches.

Thompson seedless, along with Black Monukka, should be cane pruned. Canes are just extra-long spurs. Where spurs are pruned so that only an inch or less of new growth remains (one to two buds), canes are pruned long enough so that you have 10 to 12 buds remaining on this super long spur. At this point, the extra-long spur is no longer called a spur; it is now called a cane because of its length.

Once the grape plant begins to flower , you must reduce the number of grape bunches. This is called balancing the fruit load .

The number of berries are reduced by two methods: reducing the number of grape bunches and reducing the size of the bunches. When the berries are the size of a BB, bunches are removed so that the remaining bunches are large and spaced about 10 or 12 inches apart.

Remove any bunches that are not good-sized. Also, reduce the size of the remaining bunches by pinching off the bottom third. This will allow the grape vine to send more energy and sugars to the remaining berries, making them larger and sweeter.

Bob Morris is a horticulture expert living in Las Vegas; he is on special assignment in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, for the University of California, Davis. Visit his blog at xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com.