Thursday, July 16, 2009

Onions, Onions, Onions!

I must admit that we grow some great onions. Of course, it is not like they are hard to grow or anything. You just have to put onions sets in the ground, heap the soil up around them and make sure they get plenty of water and in about a month you can harvest beautiful green onions-nothing to it. The tedious part is planting them, and well, maybe cleaning them. My kids have all complained about planting onion sets. I guess that is because when they were little and we were planting the garden that was a job I could give to them. The sets were large enough for them to handle, as opposed to tiny carrot or lettuce seeds, and it is hard to plant the sets too close together. It does take time to plant them, though and maybe that is why not many farmers have them at the markets. Rachel and my nieces have become excellent onion set planters so this year I decided that we would plant more onions, alot more onions. I ordered three fifty pound bags of onion sets. The first thing we planted this spring was a long row of onions. We have planted more onions each week. We have onions everywhere! One hundred and fifty pounds of onions goes a long, long way! We are all tired of planting onions!! Today I looked at what we had left and saw nearly a whole bag full of onion sets. We harvested potatoes for the market and so I decided that we would fill up that big empty space with those onions sets. Rachel said she'd do the planting if I made the rows--what a deal! In ten minutes I was done with my job and three hours later, the six rows planted Rachel announced she had quite of enough of onion planting. I looked at what was left of the onion sets--a whole two gallon bucket full. When we harvest Tuesday there will be more empty ground and we will plant the rest of those endless sets. I don't know if Rachel will be willing to make me the same deal again though, I may be down on my hands and knees trying to bury the last of our onion sets.

1 comment:

  1. What Mom failed to mention was that I planted them on a hill, falling the whole time, and there were lots of rocks that I had to avoid. Oh, and it was more like four hours. That was not pleasant.

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