Onions

When it is winter and you have been pouring over seed catalogs, it is fun to sow onion seeds and watch them grow.
The instructions are, "plant when the thickness of a pencil".

Mine never get any wider than this before it's time to plant them. They do grow into onions, although I worry about their little skinny selves for the first month or so after planting.

This is what my onions looked like last year. They weren't huge onions, but they were good to eat.

A week ago I was in Wal-Mart and found onions that were pencil sized for $3.33, all ready to plop in the ground. So I purchased them and put them in.

That was easy.

These are red onions and my seedlings are white, but I am going to compare how they grow. They cost twice as much as the seedlings - well maybe not since I did buy seed starting soil to use for the seeds.
I'm torn.  It just seems too easy. Like cheating. Then again, I have no qualms about buying little tomato plants.
This may be a learning moment that onions take forever so why waste my time with the seeds and worrying about putting those skinny seedlings in the ground when I can buy little onion plants, or even those onion sets that look like little miniature onions and get a head start. The money saved is negligible.

But then again, what else is there to do in the winter but plant onions.