Sow What?

Onion Time

Well to be honest almost anytime of the year is onion time but now is the normal time of the year when thoughts should start to turn towards the onion.  Don’t start to turn your nose up at the thought of any hassle connected to growing something you can, very easily, buy in the shops.  There is such a huge range of onions available from the small and very tasty spring onions through to big round ones, long ones, thin ones, fat ones, onions with red skin, white skin, golden skin, red flesh, white flesh, onions with a strong flavour, mild flavour, sweet flavour and the list goes on. Now I have never seen any real selection, like that, in my local supermarket they tend to be big & round and either ‘blow your head off’ strong or ‘was that an onion or a leek’, weak.  An onion is also, in my opinion, one of the easiest things to grow (apart from weeds).  Space them properly, find the right position and keep the area weeded.  That is almost the extent of onion growing input.

Well okay there is a little more than just that but really not too much.  The first thing to do is to select the type of onion that best suits your taste and what you want to do with it, also, if you use a lot of onions in your cooking then plan ahead and very easily you can be harvesting different onions all year (just think, another items you will not have to pay Mr. Supermarket for).  After this you need to check out your soil.  Onions don’t want to sit in water or have to force their way into really heavy soil so the area needs to have quite good draining and not too many stones.  They also like rich & fertile soil so manure your area and dig in well (and deep) quite a few weeks prior to planting.  This way the soil and plants will benefit from the fertiliser but it will be well broken down which is exactly what the onions like.  An onion also likes a little warmth.  Now this may sound a little strange for a vegetable that normally grows during the coldest part of our year but you will really benefit from planting in a sheltered position (if possible) but definately somewhere that gets as much of the winter sun as possible.

Bianca di Maggio

As I said earlier, once sown, the onions really just look after themselves. Keep the area weeded and water during the warm and dry periods. An important little note to remember is that the soil should be firm when you plant.  This is to stop the onions ‘pushing’ themselves out of the soil when growing.  Another thing to look out for are our little feathered friends.  Once the onions start to grow, the birds love to play a little game of ‘pull op the onion’.  Now this is a very popular bird passtime when not eating worms and generally mucking around.  If it happens to your crop, don’t worry.  Simply re-plant the onions and the game will stop once the onions get larger.

So, after all of that, I hope you are now deperate to do some onion planting.  Have a look at our full list of onions, the ones for September, October & November planting are White Lisbon, Amarilla, Bianca di Maggio, Colorada, Della Rocca Bruna, Prebosa, Rossa di Lucca, Tonda Musona and the  Rossa Lunga.  See we said there are quite a lot to choose from at this time of year.

Enjoy!