Can I plant shallots in wet ground?

[Tripmeup]

My onion sets have not arrived yet, and usually wait till around mid to end March for planting them.... My overwintering sets are doing fine and the ones raised from seed are doing OK too... I also put some seed ones in the greenhouses in individual small pots after pricking them out in mid Autumn and they are going great guns...

My potato onions are mostly all in modules at the moment, and because I have so many of these, I am not going to plant many shallots, so will just wait till later and plant direct..

[sammy_roser]

Plant some in modules now for an earlier crop and wait for the ground to dry out to plant the rest? After all you don't need 300 ready all at the same time but it might be nice to get 12 or so a few weeks earlier.

As I only grow shallots and not that many they have been in modules for a few weeks now.

[ourarka]

I think it's settled! Shallots going in modules this weekend .... onions can hang on for a bit. Thanks everyone.


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[kathyd]

I covered my autumn planted onions with debris netting to keep the birds (and cats and chickens) off them.

I'm wondering if it might be worth covering some ground with something to help it dry out a bit - cardboard? Plastic? I've laid some really cheap weed control fabric over 3 of my raised beds this year after a rough weeding to see if a) it keeps the weeds from coming back b) it warms the soil up a bit and c) it protects it from the constant rain. I know it's porous, but presumably lets water through more slowly?

[Penellype]

I've got my onions in under a double layer of fleece, but we haven't had anything like the rain here that most people have had, and my onion bed is about 50% sand as its where I took up a patio, so it drains really well. Last year I experimented with planting half in late February under clear plastic (which was removed at the end of April) and half in early March without the plastic, using sets from the same bag. The ones under the plastic were ready to harvest a couple of weeks earlier than the later planting. I decided to use fleece this year as I thought it was marginally less likely to blow away in the gales than plastic.