So far, the year has been kind to Vidalia onions. And
Georgia’s famous sweet crop
will soon return the favor to onion lovers everywhere. University
of Georgia experts say the onions’ quality should be the
best it’s been in years.

Quality on tap for 1999
onions

“Quality is the thing that gets our growers excited,”
said Reid Torrance, a UGA
Extension
Service agent in Tattnall County. “And these onions
look good. We’ve had the
least disease pressure we’ve had in eight or 10 years.”

Less disease means better quality in Vidalia onion
fields, Torrance said. It’s a
blessing for growers. It means their onions look, sell and
please customers better.

“We had some variety trials in the growing area. We
didn’t have to spray them
once,” said George
Boyhan, a horticulturist with
the UGA College of
Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences.

Good weather for
onions

“This year has been relatively dry in the winter and
spring,” he said. The
diseases that often plague onion growers prefer damp
conditions.

“The nights were consistently cool and the days mostly
sunny,” he said.
“That kept the onions growing nicely but not too fast.
With onions, excessive growth
invites diseases.”

Boyhan said even the onions the growers set aside for
later markets will benefit from
the improved quality going into controlled-atmosphere
storage.

Yields not as good as
quality

Torrance said the harvest started in a few fields right
after Easter and was picking up
in the second week of April. “We’re beginning to get more
mature onions,” he
said, predicting the harvest would start in earnest around
April 19.

This year’s yields, he said, won’t be quite as exciting
as the quality.

“That goes back to some poor stands we got in the
fall,” he said. “It
was hot and dry, and we had some transplant shock that
kept our growers from getting the
kind of stands we like to have.”

Some of the earliest-planted fields, too, may lose as
much as half their yields to
“doubles” and seed stems, he said. Those are onions whose
biological clocks have
clicked into their “second” year, starting their
reproductive phases.

Probably the biggest problem, he said, is that the
weather turned hot and dry in early
April. “The growers just haven’t been able to get around
with as much water as the
onions have needed,” he said.

“Those things will hurt our yield,” Torrance said. “But
overall, we’ll
have good yields. They just won’t be super. The quality is
excellent, though. And that’s
what we tend to get the most excited about.”