Fall has arrived and the main harvest season is still keeping me quite busy in the garden and in the kitchen. This spring I planted two beds of onions a few weeks apart and little by little I have been harvesting them over the past several weeks. The first planting was over run with dill and none of the bulbs were very big in that bed. I had been pulling them as needed and putting them in the salsa that I was canning and I managed to use up all the onions in that bed just for salsa. A couple of weeks ago the onion tops fell over in the second bed signaling that soon it would be time to pull all of the onions for winter storage.
Today I finally had time to get around to harvesting the onions. This bed was overgrown by weeds too, but somehow most of the onions I harvested were still nice large bulbs which would be good for storage. I worked my way down the bed pulling up onions one by one and removing the tangle of bindweed as I went. I laid the onions out to dry in the sun for a little while as I worked. When I was done I had a good sized pile of onions to show for my work.
The yellow onions are best for long term storage so I am happy to have such a good number of those. The red onions won't keep as well and I have been pulling and eating those first for the last several weeks, so there are far fewer of those in this final harvest. I took all the small ones, or ones that had grown a seed stalk and made one final batch of salsa with them because they wouldn't keep well otherwise and I didn't want them to be wasted. The rest were cleaned up and taken into my back room where they will cure over the next several weeks.
Once all the greenery has dried I will trim the bulbs and roots and then put them in the cool closet in my back room for winter storage. I never did finish using up all the onions from last winter before they started to go bad, so I think that this smaller crop will still be enough for me this year. I may dehydrate some to make backpacking meal mixes, but most I hope to use fresh over the winter.
Your onion harvest looks wonderful. Very interesting about the dill, that's one for the companion planting antagonist charts. :)
ReplyDeleteThe dill was just an overgrown accident. It self seeded from last year and I am a lazy gardener that didn't have time to pull weeds when I should have. The second onion bed may have been weeded at the right time, or the dill just didn't get the same head start that they had in the other bed. Either way I still had enough onions for salsa and a good supply of dill for my pickles. Sometimes being a lazy gardener is not a bad thing!
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