On this day in late August, Don Ed Holmes, owner and president of The Onion House, which is located almost as far south in Texas as you can go, could be found more than 1,300 miles north in Olathe, CO.

“I’m up here checking out the sweet onions on the Western Slope,” said Holmes, speaking of the geographic region in Colorado defined as west of the Continental Divide.

It’s the same area that produces Colorado’s well-known Olathe sweet corn. “We’ve had this deal for about 20 years,” he said. “We’ve got three different growers producing for us.”

The Olathe sweet onion deal typically gets going in late August and produces into mid-January. Holmes who started the morning off catching a 5:30 a.m. flight out of Weslaco, TX, near the company’s headquarters, said that after checking out the Colorado onions, he would head over to Corrine, UT, which is about an hour north of Salt Lake City, to look at that fall onion deal. He said Utah gets started a little bit later in the fall than Colorado but also lasts into January.

These two deals help give The Onion House year-round supplies of the crop for which it is named.

As Colorado and Utah are winding down their respective productions in January, supplies from south of the Texas border in Mexico will be gearing up to begin again the year-round process. Mexico is the supplier of choice for onions — mostly sweet onions — through the winter and early spring months of January, February, March and April. In April, Texas’ famous sweet onion crop takes over and typically carries The Onion House into June. Summer sees onions from many different districts including California, New Mexico and the start of the Northwest storage deals.

Holmes said the location of the two western deals in Colorado and Utah are a huge part of their success. “For onions, transportation is 50 percent of the fight,” he quipped.

Olathe is located only about an hour south of Grand Junction and the well-traveled I-70 route. Holmes calls Corrine a “truck hot spot” because that town is home to both a Walmart distribution center and a Proctor & Gamble processing plant. While Colorado is a sweet onion deal, yellow onions are the main onion crop out of the Utah region. “It’s a long day onion and it’s hard to get a sweet onion out of a long day variety.”

Holmes said the growers in the area are experimenting with milder long-day varieties but to call them sweet onions would be a mischaracterization.

“They might have an initial sweet taste but they have that bang behind it that sweet onions don’t have,” he said. “A real sweet onion just doesn’t have that pungency.”

Holmes said it has been a fairly good year for the onion producer and he expects it to continue through the fall and into the Mexican deal.

Mexican growers are currently putting their seedbeds down and the longtime onion expert expects the Mexican sweet onion volume to be fairly similar to last year. As the crop moves from Mexico to Texas next spring, Holmes said there could be a drop in supplies as Texas is still suffering through a drought.

“We’ve heard of a couple of growers that are planning to cut back, but we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.

In the meantime, The Onion House will represent onions from other regions and Holmes will continue to take first-hand looks at the crop.

“I’ll come back in December and take another look,” he said of his Centennial State sojourn. “That’s a good time to get in a little snow skiing.”