Winter onions - disaster!

Help!

Last year i planted my winter onions and have kept them weed free all year.

I have given them two chicken pellet manure feeds so far this year and they are rocketing away.

I have the biggest winter onions on my allotment site. Some of the plants have very thick stems and the bulbs are starting to swell nicely.

However, last night when i was checking them, i noticed about 6-10 of them had started throwing up the flower shoot. The size of the flower shoots were between 1cm and 4cm. I snapped them all off straight away.

Basically, my questions are:

1 - have those onions that have thrown the flower shoots up practically had it now or will they recover and form a good bulb seen as though i have snapped the flower head off early?

2 - if these have gone to flower, should i expect th rest to join them any minute?

I'm gutted!

 

I always leave a small length of flower stem so I can tell which onions have bolted and use those first. The bulbs will have have a hard cored that'll need cutting out. I've suffered so much with overwintering onions bolting for several years now so that I'm no longer bothering with them. A small amount of bolting wasn't a big deal, but when it became 100% year after year I decided they weren't worth bothering with.

 

Are these seed grown or sets?

 

Ahhh bugger! I'm really, really disappointed.

I thought i was on to a winner with these. I did leave a slight bit of stem, I'd be easily able to spot the flowering ones.

They were grown from sets. Planted them in October.

I think I know where I went wrong. When we had the really nice weather a couple of weeks back I hardly watered them. In fact I think I only watered them once. It must be that. I'm going to feed them earlier next year too.

Might try them from seed

 

I usually grow onions from seed these days.
I got fed up with my summer ones, from sets, bolting.

I dont think it has much to do with growing conditions, more to do with the sets themselves.

 

I have a few onions and a couple of shallots that have started to bolt too. I can't help thinking the very dry April we have had would not have helped and has stressed them into flowering.

 

I always considered onions to be one of the veggies which you could leave as long as you kept them weed free. Clearly not! I'll be giving them plenty of water next year.

I checked on them today and there aren't any more flower stems sprouting. Hopefully the rest will be OK. I gave them another chicken pellet feed

 

well, it turned out that the flower spikes were the least of my worries!

My bulbs got massive, couldn't believe the size of them. I reassured myself that the onions with the flower spikes could be used to make an onion gravy with the middle spike/crunchy bit thrown away until i started to notice a few weird things happening with them. Some of the plant leaves started twisting. Some started rotting in the middle. I lifted one to find... the dreaded white mold!!! Its official, my plot has white rot.

I ended up losing three quarters of my onions but managed to save some. I bagged the infected ones up and put them in my green bin. I crossed everything i had that the disease wouldn't be present in my other bed which contained my garlic, shallots, summer onions, leeks and the kelsea's. Its in there too!

I lost half of my garlic but luckily only two bunches of shallots. These seem to resist the disease a lot better. Unfortunately i think the summer onions, kelsea's and leeks will have had it by the time of harvest.

When i grew this stuff on the other side of my plot last year i had no problems. However i don't want to go through this again so might just sack off growing alliums down there all together. Which is a massive shame as its the main reason for me getting an allotment!