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The First Onions

August 4th, 2015

One of the reasons I grow different varieties is to watch how they do in my garden. I watch grow rates and harvest dates. This year ‘Martina’ onions are new to my garden. They grew well, sized up nicely and were ready to harvest this past weekend. This variety is a short day variety, so they size up without the 16 hours of sunlight that the long day ones require.
martina onions 1
According to Baker Creek, this onion does well and summer/fall onion in the northern latitudes. I should have planted my extra seed and planted them out to see how well they sized up in the fall. It’s probably too late to sow them now, but I’ll throw the extra seeds in a tray and see what happens, perhaps with a little cover they might produce a crop that will last longer in the spring than the onions harvested now.
martina onions 2
This is one of my favorite things about gardening, I get to satisfy my curiosity and get vegetable in return. I’ll be watching these onions to see how well they store.  This variety sizes up so fast, I will have to start some extra early next winter to have onions extra early from the garden. I could even grow onion sets one year to plant out in the spring.

What fun things are you doing in the garden this year? 

3 Comments to “The First Onions”
  1. Whit on August 4, 2015 at 8:15 am

    Your onions look fabulous! Our chickens dug all ours up, and i am envious.

    This year we actually had enough room in our garden area we are reclaiming from buttercup to plant a 100 sq ft space. It is apparent now that i was so excited, i overplanted squash. The new and fun thing i tried this year in the greenhouse was removing the tomato stakes and training them up twine. That has worked extremely well. And i tucked a row of kale and oakleaf lettuce behind our corn, thinking i might be able to pull off cool season crops in this blistering Seattle summer, but that only helped the lettuce thrive. The sheep were happy to have the sunbaked kale though.

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  2. JJ on August 4, 2015 at 9:44 am

    A row of onions is on my list for next year. Just harvested some shallots that were tucked into some containers at the beginning of spring;I had a few shallots that had sprouted and rather than drop them into compost I went ahead and planted them. Not a bad return for what would otherwise have been discarded ;-)

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  3. Nebraska Dave on August 4, 2015 at 10:16 am

    Susy, the onions here are starting to dry up. They bulked up really nice this year. The extra rain must have been good for them. My gardening is at a minimum this year. Only 1/4 of the size of the garden was planted. The extra work needed to reclaim the land was too much to handle with planting and caring for the garden. As you recall the garden was mostly fallow last year because of weather and health issues. The weeds came back with a vengeance so this year has been reclamation. The strawberry patch was totally decimated by deer this spring so I’m determined to complete the fence around the garden that has been a three year project. The strawberry patch is in such bad shape that I’m contemplating just digging up the whole patch and replanting the 13 plants that survived the deer snacking. Grass and bind weed are the weeds that are thriving this year.

    My sweet corn is a total loss again this year. I’m very close to having the garden area completely closed in with a six foot wooden fence. My neighbor who has his own garden area at Terra Nova Gardens planted some kind of decorative corn that grew almost 10 feet high. The ears on the stalk are nearly head high. The raccoons left it alone so far. Probably doesn’t taste as good as bodacious sweet corn or perhaps they can’t reach it with the ears so high. It’s not a corn to eat but the many colored kernels kind that are for decorations. Cucumbers are coming in by the bucket full. There’s always that one missed cucumber that turns into a huge melon. I cut one up just to see what it would taste like and even the behemoth cuke was tasty and not bitter. Green and Wax beans are just about finished for this year and the green peppers have finished their first flush and are setting the buds for another round. The tomatoes are starting to dribble in faster than I can eat them. The potatoes are drying up and the onions are too. It’s time to start thinking about fall and what to plant for a harvest in October. My area has just a couple days over 70 before Jack Frost comes back to the area. That’s a pretty good amount of time to grow the fall plants.

    Have a great harvest and fall planting day.

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This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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