When Are Red Onions Ready to Harvest? Lessons From Our Guacamole Garden

How do you know when red onions are ready to pull? Look for two things. The green tops flop over, and the onion shoulders — the top of the bulb — start showing above the soil. When most of a bed looks like that, it is harvest time.

That is exactly what we found when Becca finally got back out to her guacamole garden, and it was time to bring in pretty much everything that was left.

What is a guacamole garden?

It is the idea of growing the other things that go into guacamole alongside the avocados. We have the avocados covered; the garden beds are for the supporting cast, including the red onions and peppers in this video. Becca’s classic guacamole is where a lot of it ends up.

It is part of a bigger habit on the farm of growing as much of our own food as we reasonably can, which we wrote about in growing fruit trees on an avocado farm.

What happens when a garden gets away from you?

Becca had pneumonia for about a month, and the garden was left to itself. The results were what you would expect. The pepper plants had lost all their leaves. Crabgrass had moved into the beds, and on an avocado farm that is worth fixing even in a vegetable patch: weeds host persea mites and other pests, so we do not leave them growing near the trees. It was not the tidy vegetable patch you see on a seed packet.

But onions are forgiving. While everything else struggled, they kept doing their thing underground, and the bed was full of bulbs with their shoulders pushing up and their tops lying down. A neglected month cost us the peppers, not the onions.

How do you dig up onions?

• Check the signs. Flopped tops and visible shoulders across most of the bed.
• Loosen the soil first. Clear the dirt away from around each bulb with your fingers or a small tool.
• Pull gently. Once the soil is loose, the onion should come up without tearing the top off. Some come right out; bigger ones take a little more work.

Once they are out, the general advice for storage onions is to let them dry and cure somewhere airy and out of direct sun before you store them, so the necks close up and the skins firm.

Is it a good job for kids?

One of the best. Pulling an onion out of the ground is immediate and satisfying, and the boys dug right in. There is a moment in the video where one comes out bigger than anyone expected, and the excitement is entirely real. Kids who help pull vegetables out of the dirt tend to be a lot more interested in eating them.

Gardens teach you not to panic about a bit of neglect, too. We have thought a lot about how generous growing things can be, and wrote about it in food scarcity versus natural abundance.

Homegrown onions deserve good avocados. Our 4lb and 6lb Hass boxes ship free, picked the week they go out, and between harvests you can join the waitlist on either page. Until the trees are picking again, the avocado scoop, the Hawaiian shirt and our hats ship year-round.

This post is part of our guide to life on our family grove.