We can’t deny it any longer: it’s September, it’s cooler, and it looks like autumn is on its way. Time to think about harvesting some more of our crops. Today it was onions.
As you can see from the picture, they aren’t enormous, but they are well matured, with satisfying brown papery skins that rustle as you rub them. This is good. Their bottoms are still a little dirty, but the tops have been allowed to dry off in a few days of glorious sunshine, which means they are ready for use or for storage pretty much right away.
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve been harvesting onions this year. Back in February we harvested the last onions from 2008. In fairness they had probably been left in the ground a little too long and some were too mushy, but this time around the crop is close to perfect.
Now we need to decide how we’re going to store them. One option is to tie them up with string and hang them from the ceiling in the outhouse. That way they should keep until February or March, but as most of the leaves have come off that’s not really practical.
You can blanche and freeze them, by slicing them thinly first, but who really wants to cook with frozen onions? Not me.
So I suspect we’ll end up pickling them. For that we need to bag ourselves some kilner jars, which we’re heading out to find now.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Nik,
I’ve been following your blog for a while and enjoying it immensely. You seem the ideal person to ask what I should do with the container we’ve just harvested the potatoes from. I don’t like to just leave it sitting there doing nothing until spring. Any suggestions? We live in Switzerland so the winter will be very cold.
Hi Nik,
Nice blog about onions in the garden. I have grown onions for the first time in our garden. In India the vegetable mongers used to sell onion stalks(or whatever the outside green part of the onion plant is called) along with the onion flower. they used to be costly too. We used to make nice curry with those chopped onion stalks. I tried to do the same with my onion stalks. But mine were’nt straight at all. They used to sell nice straight onion stalks in India. Moreover I found all sorts of worms inside the hollow of my onion stalks here. Am I getting something worng(may be they weren’t onion stalks at all what we used to buy in India) or are there too many bugs in our garden? I have thrown all my onion stalks away.