March, 3rd Week - Onions
Dirty Nails writes from personal experience, having supplied his family of four over the years with enough fresh produce to eat their fill. His book combines his love of gardening with the natural pleasures of being outdoors and 'in amongst it'. The author seeks to de-mystify the art of kitchen and allotment gardening, making the thrills, spills, triumphs and tribulations accessible to all-comers, whatever their level of gardening experience.
ONIONS
Planting onion sets is an early spring highlight for Dirty Nails, especially if he has warm morning sunshine on his back when doing so. The job has been completed this week. The onion bed was thoroughly prepared beforehand, with leaf-mould and well rotted manure dug in, then wood ash raked in. Dirty Nails likes to give his onion bed two or three good rakings before he treads it all down. Onions like a firm footing. Stuttgarter Giant, Sturon and Red Baron are all widely available as sets.
Dirty Nails marks out his rows a foot (30 cm) apart, and places the acornsized onions along these rows at 6 inch (15 cm) intervals. When they are in place it is simply a case of pushing each tiny onion into the soil, leaving just the husky tip standing proud. Use a finger to make a little nest for each one, and firm it in. Keep an eye on them closely for the first week or so and press back any that are lifted by frost, birds, or their own sprouting roots. Keep moist and weed-free, watch the green shoots grow, and the bulbs swell. It will be well into August before Dirty Nails thinks about harvesting.
NATURAL HISTORY IN THE GARDEN
Badgers in March
VEGETABLE SNIPPETS
SOME FACTS ABOUT ONIONS
The Ancient Egyptians held that onions symbolised eternal life. This is thought to be on account of this bulbous vegetable’s globular shape and the concentric rings concealed within its papery skin. Cultivation is believed to have commenced in that part of the world around 3000 BC and onions are one of the first domesticated crops ever to be written about.
Cultivated onions (Allium cepa) are just one of about 450 species in the allium family known about worldwide. Many, though by no means all, are edible. These days raising a harvest from sets, as opposed to seed, is considered to be a consistently reliable method of producing food in the kitchen garden or on the allotment. Sets are simply small onions, part-grown and then heat treated. Fewer varieties are available commercially compared to seeds, and this does limit choice for the gardener. They are also a more expensive way of growing this veg although in truth it is only a matter of pennies. However the flip-side of this is that mass produced sets have democratised onion growing, giving everyone the opportunity to be successful in nurturing a good crop of onions.
