Sunday, May 26, 2019

Do Onions Make You Cry?

When the tops of the onions turn slightly yellow, bend and fall over, they are sending a signal to you that it is time to harvest them.  This year we planted three bundles of Short Day Samplers that consist of Texas 1015 Sweet, Creole Red, and White onions.  The onions got off to a very bad start.  Our can got into the garden and proceeded to dig up an entire row of freshly planted onions.  I replanted them, but a bunch of them had already dried out.  Oh well, we got some to harvest.  In the photo below you can see that they have fallen over.


I pulled them up and laid them on top of the hay.  This allows them to dry in the sun for a day or two.  Unfortunately, it had just rained, and it was very hot and humid.  I'm not sure how much "drying" is going to take place.


After a couple of days, I went back to the garden to cut off the tops and put the onions in crates for further curing.  Here is a Texas Sweet 1015:


Here is a white onion.  These actually did the best this year.  Not many of the Texas Sweets survived.  Too bad, as those are my favorites.  The Creoles' bulbs are smaller than the others.


After I snipped off the onion tops, I loaded the onions into our garden wagon.  I'll bring these inside to continue drying in lower humidity.


Our yield of onions was noticeably smaller than in previous years.  I attribute that to THE CAT, a very wet growing season, and I did lose some to rot.  In fact, some of the smaller Creole onions are soft right now.  I'll have to watch them closely.  If the onions don't dry properly, I'll have to quickly chop them and freeze them so that they don't all go bad on me.  We love onions and although our 2019 crop wasn't exactly up to par, we'll try again next year!  We'll not cry over the onions... well, at least not until we cut them up to cook with them.

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