Just In Time Delivery

Don't you like getting things in the mail?  Sure, we get emails and texts, and that is great.   But there's something special to walk out to the mailbox and open the door to the box to see what the mail carrier brought.  It's always a time of anticipation.  Don't get me wrong, junk mail, political mailers and bills can indeed throw some shade on checking the mail.  But there are good days for checking the mail.

Take yesterday, for example.  There was a box on the island where we always put incoming mail.  It was a USPS box that made me curious as to what it could be.

Well, immediately I saw that it was from Dixondale Farms in Carizzo Springs, Texas.  That means our onion order for 2022 had arrived.  I'm excited to get these planted.  This year I ordered 3 bunches of onion plants.  Each bunch contains between 50 - 75 onion plants in them.  So, we'll have roughly 200 onions this year, if the Good Lord's willing.  Each bunch costs $9.00, so that makes the cost about $0.12 per onion.  Dixondale Farms does a good job of sending you information on how to plant your onions for success.  Additionally, during the growing season, they provide you with emails on how to care for them at different growing stages, as well as harvesting and curing.  In looking at the materials, they are a family outfit, and I like that.

Since we are in the Southern region of the United States, we order the Short Day varieties.  These varieties are suited for 10 - 12 hours of sunlight.  I think I ordered the same amount of onion plants as last year, but this year I changed up one of the varieties.

I got two bunches of Short Day Samplers.  The Sampler package contains: Red Creole Onions, Texas Early White Onions, and 1015Y Texas Super Sweet Onions.  I have always liked samplers and this one gives you a good variety of onions that we love.  This year I added a bunch of Yellow Granex onions.  These are most popular sweet onions in America.  In fact, these are shipped to the growers of the famous sweet onions in Vidalia, Georgia.  I'm really looking forward to these!

We had our best onion harvest ever in 2021.  We cooked with them, made French Onion soup with them, and we also dried many jars of them and have in our pantry.  We used the last onion a few weeks ago.  So we're anxious to get these in the ground.  Once we get them planted, in 90-110 days, they'll be mature.  The earlier you plant them, the larger they'll grow.  We love onions!

Mail Order Onions

This is the time of the year that we always plant our onions.  I tried one time to plant onions from seed.  It was disastrous.  I didn't harvest a single onion.  One year I'll try again and try to determine what went wrong.  For now, we've found a fool-proof (almost) way to grow onions - we order them in the mail.

We purchase them from Dixondale Farms and you can check them out at THEIR WEBSITE.  They are located south and west of San Antonio, Texas about 25 miles from Mexico.  Their website is very helpful in telling you which types of onions you should plant in your zone.  In South Louisiana we plant Short Day Onions.  I generally purchase a couple of Short Day Samplers which include a mixture of 1015 Sweet, Texas White, and Red Creole Onions.

They ship them to us in early January and the first sunny day we get, we go out to plant them.

The first thing I did is to tie some baling twine from fence to fence to "pop a line."  Then I used a rake to rake back the wood chip mulch that fully covers the garden since we're doing the "Back to Eden" gardening method now.  Once I exposed the soil, I worked up the soil with a hoe.  The soil is teeming with earthworms and that is a good sign!  One thing that is not so good is soil moisture.  Naturally, the wood chips are going to preserve moisture in the soil and that is a great thing in the dry summer month.  But we've had 10 inches of rain SO FAR in January.  The soil is a little muddy right now.

But nevertheless, we pressed on and planted.  I planted the onions four inches apart and planted them 1 inch deep.  You don't want to plant them any deeper or they won't bulb and then you'll just have green onions.

We finished planting them all.  We have planted five 25 foot rows of onions in our garden this year.  If they all make it, we'll have onions to last the whole year.  One thing I have to work on prior to harvest is building some drying boxes.  In the summer when the onions ripen, it is usually hot and humid.  I've had problems in the past with both onions and garlic.  They want to soften and rot.  I have to do a better job of curing and drying so that they will store.  I have a plan!  I am going to build some boxes with hardware cloth bottoms that are the same dimension as a box fan.  Then I'll set the onions in the boxes that are stacked atop the box fan blowing upward and hopefully that will dry them.  That's the plan anyway.  We'll report how it goes this summer upon harvest.