Our first onion was a lot smaller when we’d dug it up than it looked in the ground. It had been flowering quite impressively, with a fat stem snaking up from the bulb, sprouting from a three-inch wide white island in the sea of earth that makes up the plot. Pulling it out of the ground and taking it into the kitchen, though, it soon became clear that it was all show and no trousers.

The bottom, you see, was flat, which was great for cutting as it sat easily on the worktop, but meant it was only half the size we were expecting. That’s not necessarily a problem as we’d have been trimming it in half anyway, but it does mean that our onion crop – if they’re all like this – might yield only half of what we were expecting.

Either way, it was a lovely mild onion that you could happily slice without your eyes watering and, as the base of a Quorn lasagne, a good start to a great evening meal.

Related posts:

1. Harvesting and storing onions
2. Harvesting the carrots late
3. Harvesting the beetroot