Digging in the garden is a wonderful way to start the day. It’s so nice to spend an hour before work out in the fresh air, the chickens contentedly clucking to themselves as they peck over last night’s vegetable peelings, listening to the sound of dog walkers passing by in the alley.

I want to get the plot ready for planting by the end of the weekend, so started this morning by taking out the last onions of 2008′s sets. Not a bad haul: 800g in total, mainly of whites, but with a couple of red ones thrown in. It would have been higher, but some had gone bad and had to be thrown away as they would have been no good for cooking.

We go through onions at a fair rate, so I don’t think this end of the crop will last us all that long, which begs the question whether it’s worth giving them another go next year when we could give the ground over to something more productive and longer-lasting, like another variety of beans that we could freeze, or another batch of sprouts that were so nice a couple of years ago but we gave a miss this time around.

Or maybe parsnips…

Related posts:

1. Harvesting and storing onions
2. Pickled onions
3. How to grow your own onions