How many onions should I plant per person?
Short answer
5 ft fresh, 30–50 ft to store
About five feet of row per person if you're eating them fresh through the season, and thirty to fifty feet per person if you want onions in storage until spring. This crop has the widest disagreement in the extension tables — a tenfold spread — and it resolves completely once you know which of those two gardens you're planting.
The arithmetic
- Kansas State and Virginia Tech put yield at 7–10 lbs per 10 feet of row; Clemson's plan gives 20 lbs from 20 feet.
- USDA-NRCS puts a year's supply at 5–10 lbs per person.
- At 3–4 inch spacing, 30 feet of row is roughly 100 onions.
- A household using an onion most days needs 250–350 a year — call it 75–100 row feet for a family of four planning to store.
The widest spread in the tables — 3 feet or 50?
No crop disagrees with itself more than onions do across extension publications.
- Kansas State MF315
- 3–5 feet per person
- Texas A&M
- 5 ft fresh / 30 ft to preserve
- Missouri G6201
- 25–50 feet per person
- Virginia Tech
- 20–30 plants per person
- WVU
- 20 plants per person
- USDA-NRCS
- 5–10 lbs · 3–7 row ft
Kansas State's 3–5 feet and Missouri's 25–50 feet look irreconcilable until you read Texas A&M, which splits the column explicitly: 5 feet for fresh use, 30 feet to preserve. Kansas State is describing salad onions through summer. Missouri is describing a braided year's supply hanging in the pantry. Texas A&M is the source that shows you both, and it dissolves the contradiction entirely.
Five feet per person is fresh eating. Thirty per person is a year's supply. Nothing in between is wrong — it's just a decision about how much of your cooking starts with an onion.
What changes your number
- Day length. Onions bulb in response to day length, and planting the wrong type for your latitude is the most common reason for a poor crop. Long-day varieties for the north, short-day for the south, intermediate through the middle.
- Sets, transplants, or seed. Sets are easiest but more prone to bolting; seed gives the best storage onions but needs an early start indoors.
- Storage variety. Sweet onions do not keep. If you want onions in March, plant a storage type — pungency and keeping quality go together.
- Curing. Onions need two to three weeks of dry curing with the tops on before storage. This step, not the growing, is what usually decides whether they last.
- Spacing. 3–4 inches in-row, rows 12–24 inches apart. WVU's intensive figure is 8 sweet onions per square foot in beds.
How to store them — and the mistake to avoid
| Crop | Temperature | Humidity | Storage life |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onions, dry | 32–40°F | 65–70% | 1–9 months |
| Garlic | 32–40°F | 65–70% | 6–9 months |
| Onion sets | 32°F | 65–70% | 6–8 months |
| Green onions | 32°F | 95–100% | 3–4 weeks |
| Potatoes (for contrast) | 38–45°F | 90–95% | 4–10 months |
Look at the humidity column. Onions and garlic want it dry — 65–70% — while potatoes, carrots, beets and nearly everything else in a root cellar want 90–100%. Putting onions in a damp cellar alongside the root crops is the single most common storage failure, and it's why traditional practice hangs onions in a dry attic or shed rather than putting them underground. Figures from USDA Agriculture Handbook 66 via University of Maine, cross-checked against Iowa State and South Dakota State.
Space it needs
A hundred row feet for a family of four's storage supply, at 18-inch row spacing, is about 150 square feet. Onions are also one of the slowest crops in the garden — 100–120 days to maturity — so that ground is committed for most of the season.
What to do with the surplus
Cure them properly and onions are among the easiest things on the homestead to keep. Dry, dark, cool, and airy — and separate from anything that wants humidity.
Then stop planning from averages
Homestead Paradise tracks what you harvested and what's left, so the question of whether thirty feet was enough gets answered by your own pantry rather than next year's guesswork.
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Sources
Every figure on this page comes from a land-grant university extension service, the USDA, or a breed registry — never from another blog.