Rotting Onions

[gentlearts]

Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke

I am so tired of this. I buy a small bag of onions, enough for about two weeks and half the onions are rotting inside. The ones that aren't rotted feel like they have been improperly dried for storage. Some of them have semi-transparent outer layers that look like they have been frozen.


Is this going on country wide, or did I get stuck in a bad onion corner?


I needed onions and the store I was in was charging 98 cents a pound for onions. I picked out one that looked really good just to get me through the night and until I could get to a store with more reasonable prices. I got it home and half of the inside had to be thrown away

If I had that happen at a store more than once, I would assume they were not the best place to buy produce.

[Zymer]

Originally Posted by gentlearts

If I had that happen at a store more than once, I would assume they were not the best place to buy produce.

For some of us, our only choices are 'take it' or 'leave it'.


Up here in ME, Hannaford has taken over supplying a whole lot of our smaller and once independent grocery stores. It's Hannaford or nothing.

[DontH8Me]

Originally Posted by HJ99

I mostly buy red onions and they usually keep close to a month, though you will get a rotten one once in a while. Make sure they look fresh and very firm when you buy them. If pre-packaged, unfortunately have to look real close as one bad onion will spoil the bag in short order.

As to garlic, thats a nightmare anymore as most garlic seems now to come from China and its not always well labeled as to country of origin. If its cheap, its probably from China. I assume its the cheap slave labor to hand harvest/sort it or something. Chinese garlic doesnt keep well at all. Might be good time to start growing your own if you have a garden.

Always buy our garlic at Costco. They only carry Christopher Ranch garlic, grown in Gilroy, CA. I stopped buying garlic in grocery stores when I realized most of it was imported from China, which was probably about 15-20 years ago.

[TheShadow]

You can tell American grown garlic from Chinese. The garlic from China has all the little dried roots on the bottom scraped off. American grown garlic will still have a few short scraggly roots at the base. Onions are usually really not prone to rotting in CA for at least a few weeks because 1) they are grown there in ABUNDANCE, and so they are generally fairly local, and 2) the climate is so dry that they are dried in the field for a couple days to harden them off before shipping. In areas in the east, the climate is more damp and there is more rain in the summer, so it's hard to properly harden them off in the field before gathering them for packaging and shipping.

[gentlearts]

Good to know. I think we can manage to produce garlic in the usa.