Onion

Meet the onion, the crop that does most of its work out of sight. For weeks a bed of onions looks like nothing more than thin green spears, while below the soil each bulb swells a little more every day.

Its character is patient and tidy. Onions ask for sun, steady water and a short row of food each month, and they take up almost no room: a hand-width between plants is enough. You can pull a few young ones for salads long before the rest are ready.

What it brings is the satisfaction of lifting a harvest you can keep. Once the tops fall over, the bulbs dry in a shaded corner and go into the kitchen for weeks, long after the winter bed has been cleared.

Onions are the quiet, slow crop of the Dubai winter bed. The UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment's calendar lists nursery planting from September to November and field planting from October to December, and gives two harvest times, 150 days and 60 days. We read the shorter figure as green onions pulled young and the longer as full bulbs. The Ministry's Undersecretary named green onion among the crops residents should grow at home when the Plant the Emirates programme launched in October 2024, as Khaleej Times reported.

UF/IFAS explains the one choice that decides success. Onions are classed as short-day, mid-day or long-day by the hours of daylight they need to start a bulb, and at southern latitudes short-day cultivars do best in the autumn crop. Dubai lies at about 25°N, so look for short-day types on the seed packet or the set label. UF/IFAS says sets, small bulbs ready to plant, are quicker and easier than seed: set them 1 inch (2.5 cm) deep and 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 cm) apart, with a foot between rows, feed with a complete fertiliser at planting and nitrogen monthly, and irrigate frequently. Bulbs are ready in four to five months, when about a quarter of the green tops have fallen over.

Onions mind salty water. FAO rates bulb onion as sensitive to salt, with a yield threshold of about 1.2 dS/m, one of the lower figures in its vegetable table, so use mains water on a drip line and fill the bed with sweet soil rather than native sand. After lifting, UF/IFAS says to cure the bulbs for a couple of weeks in a cool, dark, dry, well-ventilated place, then trim the tops and roots and store them somewhere cool and dry. A Dubai gardener profiled by Gulf News counts onions among the crops in her garden.