Did Your Onions Make you Cry Last Year?

A friend recently stopped me in the store 

to ask about his onion crop.

On his phone, he showed me photos that looked like this:

Surely this is a condition called 'soft rot', caused by bacterial decay.

There are a number of ways that onions can be infected with soft rot.

The bacteria is commonly found in the soil and will

enter the bulb through wounds and aging tissue under moist conditions.

Excessive irrigation in hot weather is another way to encourage soft rot, 

which is often not detectable until the onions have been in storage for some time.

Other causes can be wind or hail damage, onion maggots, sunscald, or freezing, all of 

which damage the tissue and create opportunities for the bacteria to enter the bulb.

Soft rot often will affect one layer of the onion while adjacent layers are unaffected.

A sulfurous and offensive odor is often another indication of soft rot.

Soft rot does commonly exist in the soil, but you can take measures to prevent it by:

• not watering too much
• take care when handling the bulbs during harvest so as to not make wounds for the bacteria to enter
• dry the tops thoroughly before storing (like in this picnic table idea, above) 
• store the bulbs in a cool, dry, dark location

There are no onion cultivars that are immune to soft rot, because it

is a cultural problem, not a disease.

And, before I go, this made me laugh: