Vegmonkey and the Mrs.

Vegmonkey’s Onions                            The Mrs’ Onions

Last year we just strung the onions up on some old wire shoe racks as can be seen from last years post here. This year we have probably 4 times as many onions from the same 1.2 metre square space. We’ve pulled out over 100 of varying sizes and shapes. After an initial worry that they were all going to bolt, it only turned out that about 6 did, so that wasn’t a problem. It was mostly the red ones, so next year i will ensure i buy heat treated Red Baron.

So to hang them this year i taught myself how to string them up correctly. I used this website linked from Jane Perrone’s blog as a guide as to how to do it. It really wasn’t as hard as i had expected! I was going to do a photo guide on how to do it, but got so carried away, they ended up strung!

I have another load still in the ground, so maybe i’ll do some sort of illustration when they come out and dry.

After tying a string myself, i showed the Mrs. how to do it…so she proceeded to do it much better than i did! Oh well! Mine are strung from the wooden door in the kitchen, and hers from a hook above the hallway for all to see!

I posted a while ago that a lot of out Spring sown onion sets were bolting. It turned out that only a handful went to seed. The rest have happily filled out so much that 80% or so are ready to harvest. I’m going to leave them for a week or so, then pull them up. The plan is to fill the space with carrots - if all goes to plan, the ground will have served us twice in one season, and we’ll be eating some nice Christmas carrots! Either way, i can’t wait to start eating them, particularly the delicious looking red ones…it’ll be a while though as we have loads. I am going to make a point of learning how to plait them correctly this year, rather than just hanging them up individually in the shed, a la last year.

This theory of using the ground twice in a year is a bit of a ‘Mantra’ for us here at Vegmonkey and the Mrs.  We have already grown a crop of early potatoes and Japanese ‘Senshyu’ Onions in the bed closest to the house, and it now has sweetcorn and courgettes growing well…and it’s only mid July. Also, as i posted yesterday, the second lot of cauliflowers have gone into the space the first lot came out of.

They key i think is having the foresight to plant the seeds and have things ready to fill the space. I’ve ended up with an excess of tomato plants and a spare courgette, which is never bad!

We have harvested all our onions. 37 from a space no bigger than 120cm long by 45cm wide, using sets from Wilkinsons! Now that shows how easy it is to grow onions if nothing else does. I have hung them by their necks in the shed from a makeshift drying rack consisting of an old underbed shoe rack, dismantled and attached to the shed roof and walls with garden twine and nails.

Maybe next year we will tie them correctly in plaits…for now they look happy enough. When the necks start to go papery and the onions develop more of a coating, i’ll take them down and put them on top of the drying rack, for use throughout the winter.

To keep the space busy, i’ve emptied the remaining hundreds of Amsterdam Forcing carrot seeds into the space where the onions came from and covered it with a cloche. I don’t think we’ll have to do much thinning as the slugs generally do that for us. Maybe it’s time for another load of nematodes!