rotten/fly infested dry stored onions

[JerseyJimbo]

i harvested and hung my onions, red and white, in mixed ropes about late sept when the weather turned. I left them to dry before tying them and ive hung them in a dry dark cool storeroom, however i have started getting ones that are rotten from the inside out and smell terrible, and taking them out of the dark room the white ones are the worst affected but there seem to be many small black flies, a few of the onions are crawling with them...

So i took them all out of the room, cut them from the ropes and sorted through them all out, binned off all of the ones that seemed to be affected and have put them in an open newspaper lined cardboard box in my kitchen. Unfortunately i dont seem to of cured the problem as im still pulling soggy stinking white onions from the box.

I am very reluctant to bin the whole harvest so is there anything i can do to save the rest of them, it mainly seems to be the whites that are affected with the odd red. As a side note ive had shallots about a foot away from the rest of the onions in the store and these have not been affected?

[Two_Sheds]

Yuck

Onion fly?

[Aberdeenplotter]

keep binning and hope you get down to the keepers shortly

[PAULW]

JJ
The problem I have found with onions is if they have started to go to seed/bolt there is a green shoot which when storing the onions will rot, this then takes the rest of the onion with it, I have found that there are very few years where the growing conditions have been right for successful storing onions therefore I tend to use them as soon as possible for making chutney and other pickles. The black flies have not come out of the onions and are not the cause of the rotting they are there because the onions are rotting.

[Shadylane]

Quite a few of mine have gone mouldy/rotten and the white ones seemed to be worse than the red. I think I may have left them in the ground too long as they took ages to flop over, but even when they had I think I was a bit slack in harvesting them. Plus we had quite a cold, wet autumn which can't have helped. If you still have quite a few left and don't want to lose them why not chop and freeze them? Will save you time when cooking too.

[JerseyJimbo]

Looking at the link from 2sheds i think it looks similar to neck rot, but i was very careful to dry them out properly, possibly not careful enough? The ones that had bolted i used first and the rest went to store, i had great success last year with hanging my onions and was using them for about 4 months after they had been pulled, i did not have a single problem with rot or fly?

It looks like i am going to have to chop and freeze the remainder to stop the rot and save some of the crop. I looks like i will need another freezer for next year... If whilst im chopping i can take some pictures of any of the bad ones or of the flies and i will post them for better id...

Thanks for your suggestions all