If your mouth is already watering for that first Vidalia
onion of the season, you’re in
luck. The early spring weather has this year’s harvest weeks
ahead of the normal
schedule.

“Growers will probably start digging onions by the end
of March,” said George
Boyhan, a horticulturist with the University of Georgia
Extension Service.

If that’s true, he said, Vidalia onions should show up
in stores in the first week of
April. In more normal years, growers don’t start harvesting
until mid- to late April.

Early onions aren’t the whole story, either. Heading
into the harvest, virtually
everything about Vidalia onions was sweet.

“The quality is really going to be there, and the yields
are going to be there,” Boyhan
said. “The next hurdle for the growers is the price.”

If prices are a little lower this year, though, not many
shoppers will complain.

When growers dig their onions, workers cut off the stems
and bag them in the fields.
On most farms, the onions then go into drying hoppers for two to
three days. Then
they’re packaged and shipped out. An onion dug today may be on a
grocery shelf next
week.

There’s only one little problem with buying the first
Vidalia onions of the season.

“In general, sweet onions don’t store very well,” Boyhan
said. “And the earliest onions
on the market aren’t going to store as well as the rest.”

All that means, though, is that you shouldn’t buy all
your Vidalia onions early. Just
buy a supply for a week or so at a time.

Growers plant different varieties of Vidalia onions, he
said. Some of those grow faster
and develop bulbs sooner than others. One, “Sugar Queen,” is
particularly early.
Growers have about 500 acres of Sugar Queen onions.

“Those are the ones they’ll be picking when they first
start digging,” he said.

The early varieties often have a little flatter bulb
than later onions. Because they grow
faster, they have a little more moisture in them, too. So
they’re slightly softer.

“We recommend harvesting onions when 20 percent of the
tops fall over,” Boyhan
said. “With these early varieties, to get the best quality,
growers need to wait a little
longer and let the onions mature a little more.”

But growers plant those varieties so they can catch the
all-important early-season
market, when prices are high. So instead of letting them mature
longer, they normally
don’t wait as long to start digging as they do for later
onions.

As a result, the first Vidalia onions on the market
won’t keep very long. But there’s
nothing wrong with the taste. In fact, Boyhan said the early
onions are among the
sweetest of the season.

“As a rule, the early and midseason onions are the
sweetest,” he said. “The onions
harvested at the very end of the season may be a little
hotter.”

Whenever you buy them, pay attention to how you store
Vidalia onions, Boyhan said.
They keep their quality best when kept separate at room
temperature, with good air
circulation around them.

Refrigerating them may keep them longer but will also
make them hotter over time.

By law, Vidalia onions are grown only in a 20-county
area surrounding their namesake
city. About 200 growers will harvest a crop officially estimated
at 14,575 acres.

Boyhan said a number of environmental factors affect
onions’ pungency. A key one is
the amount of sulfur in the soil.

Growers have to apply fertilizer that contains sulfur
soon after transplanting their
onions. But as the onions develop, rainfall and irrigation tend
to leach the sulfur from
the naturally low-sulfur, sandy soils in the Vidalia growing
area.

“That’s one of the reasons they’re as sweet as they
are,” Boyhan said.