Planting out my onions

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

Last year I grew some onions by a different method. Instead of growing each onion separated from its fellows, I grew them in clumps. This allowed me to produce many more onions, although of course they were much smaller ones. We found the small onions very versatile in the kitchen – there are times when a big onion is more than you need. I’m using this technique again this year.

This year I sowed my onion seeds in the first week of February, and brought them on first indoors and then in my coldframe. For the last few days they have been outdoors all day, acclimatising. Now I have planted them out in one of my raised beds.

I had available a total of 24 pots / clumps of onion seedlings – 9 each of “Bedfordshire Champion” and “Elista and Karminka mix”, and 6 of “Ailsa Craig” – but in the end I only used 20, because I felt that any more would have made them too crowded. Anyway, it leaves me with four spares ready to cope with any emergencies!

I put the onions in two rows of 10, with about 20cm between clumps, and the rows about 30cm apart.

I have left room in this bed for a row of Beetroot, which I will be sowing soon.

As regular readers know, I get a lot of problems with foxes / badgers / cats digging in my raised beds and little seedlings are never safe without protection, so immediately after planting I covered the onions with netting. I have a good collection of aluminium rods of various lengths and some of the “Build-a-Ball” sets for joining them together, so it was easy enough to construct a suitable frame.

The frame was then covered with black fabric netting which was weighted-down with some bricks.

That should keep the little blighters off!

Now all I have to do is wait for the onions to grow. They require very little maintenance, just weeding whenever necessary and occasional watering. They should be ready for harvesting some time in August, I reckon.

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