Wooly Onions

Some experiments succeed, some experiments fail.  And others hang in this sort of “I’m not so sure” grey area.

The experiment in question:

Use wool to mulch overwinter onions.

Why wool as a mulch?

The wool that Dirt’s sheep produce is marginal at best.  We also do not have the equipment at this time to deal with the raw fleeces, to send the wool out to be processed into something my girls could spin up is expensive for what the final product from our wool is…. and so on.  Plus some of his shearing customers beg him to take their unusable wool as well.  Therefore we end up with a lot of waste wool. 

It could go into the big compost piles, it does add to the need of compost for potting soil and side dressing.  But I also need a nice thick mulch for overwinter stuff.  So last fall I tried it.  I tried leaves in another spot in the Market Garden, the leaves left. But that is another story.

This experiment was a bit hard to read:

I was late in planting the onion seed resulting in plants that were not as large as they could have been at the time I mulched them. 

I didn’t mulch all the varieties I planted.  I was testing the overwintering ability of some onion varieties new to me.   I chose to use only two of the varieties in the wooly experiment, Walla Walla and Ailsa Craig.  I had so many of them I felt I could sacrifice them, and I have overwintered these varieties in the past with good result so I knew it would give me a read of some sort.    The other varieties were on their own just to see if they could handle overwintering or not. (Two new varieties of unmulched onions did awesome.- but that’s for another report on onion varieties.)

Being small at mulching time made them hard to deal with. An then when the strong winds came the wool did blow around a bit and some blew over a few of the smaller ones and smuffocated them.

What I concluded so far:

The wool certainly did not harm the seedlings in any way, well, except for the wee ones that were smuffocated.

The soil under and beside the wool did not heave.  Nice!  Definitely a plus, the uncovered heaving soil was the demise of many of the little onion plants in the rest of the bed.  The larger the onion the better the anchor and the less effect the constant heaving of our freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw winters, but even the well anchored larger onions get set back from having their roots disturbed.

The wool mulch kept weeds at bay, a big plus, a very big plus.  If I find myself with lots and lots of wool, all the naked beds might have wool coats! The soil under the mulch was perfect, hardly looks like just wintered soil at all!

Within the individual varieties the wooly onions seem to be the healthiest. 

Will I do it again? 

Yeah, why not, it didn’t hurt them and I do think it actually helped.

Changes:

Get the onion seeds planted on time in August, the first two weeks.

Mulch later in the fall so the onions have plenty of time to be large enough that the mulch can be better manipulated around them.

Make everybody help me so that all the onion beds get done. (Stop laughing Dear Reader, I’m serious.)

Get an awesome machine that deals with dirty fleeces and turns them into little mulching tubes to go inbetween the rows of onions – I hear you laughing again Dear Reader, this time I’ll let you.

Expansion?

You bet!  Now that I know that the wool doesn’t have some weird deleterious effect on plants, none of the onions baahed at me, I will use it to mulch most of my overwinter crops.  I’m thinkin’ many overwinter crops are like me, if my feet are warm and toasty in woolies I’m good to go for a little bit longer.

Wool.  It’s what every discerning crop wears next winter.