Onion Starts vs Onion Sets

What is the difference between onion starts and onion sets, and is one better than the other? This isn’t really about terminology. This blog post is more about how we plant and use starts and sets, and what we’ve found works best, after lots of experimentation (garden experimentation, not super sciency experimentation).

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Onion Starts

Onion starts are starter plants you can order online or purchase locally. We buy ours at either our local hardware store or Farmer’s Coop (we live in a small town surrounded by rural areas).

Onion starts are actual plants that were started in ground, then removed from the soil and bundled for sale. When you replant them, they continue to grow, and will bulb up when your days reach the appropriate number of hours (find out which onions to grow in your area here).

We grow these onions for use as bulbing onions, and they usually do well. They are probably one of the easiest things to grow in the garden, other than garlic, so definitely give them a try if you have never grown them.

Onion Sets

Onions sets are small bulbs which are usually sold in bags. We buy a few bags of onion sets each year at our local Atwood’s store.

These are bulbs that were grown last season, and pulled before they were allowed to fully mature. Onions are biennial plants, which means they go to flower and make seed during their second year of growth. So when you plant onion sets, they usually flower before they reach the bulbing phase.

This is why we grow onion sets for green onions. You can plant them about one inch apart, wherever you have space in your garden, too! To harvest, you can pull the whole onion, or cut the tops back and allow them to regrow. So easy!