Planting Onion sets

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Having got my cloches washed and ready to go, I am eager to get the raised beds filled once more. With the protection the cloches will provide I felt that it would be justifiable to plant something at last. The onions I have been growing in the big coldframe looked ready to go, so they were the first candidates for planting.

As you know, this is my first time growing onions, so I was not really sure that they were ready, but an enquiry posted on Twitter and Facebook has produced some reassurances that they look “Good to go”. When I tipped them out of the pots there was a decent amount of root – enough to hold the soil together while I planted the onions.

A couple of the “Red Baron” onions had been reluctant to sprout, so I brought them indoors for a few days, which did the trick, and they have now sprung into life. Being about 2 weeks behind the others, they are smaller than their siblings of course, so I have kept them as spares to replace any casualties.

So here you go, I now have two rows of onions. I planted not only the ones from the little pots seen above, but also more that went straight into the soil “from scratch”. I now have 40 onions – plus of course the ones I have grown from seed, though those are still too small to plant out. Presumably they will mature at different times.

Once the planting was complete, the rows were covered with two of the Longrow cloches.

The other side of the bed will in due course be populated with the grown-from-seed onions and a row of Leeks.

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