Harvesting the Garlic
Over the weekend I harvested my garlic. I usually wait until there are 5 or 6 green leaves left on the plants. Here’s my post on How to Tell if Garlic is Ready to Harvest.
My garlic crop is a mix of varieties that I’ve been growing for a few years now. There are white and purple varities, some that produce HUGE bulbs and some that produce small ones. All of the type I grow are hardneck, though next year I’ll be adding some softneck garlic because I hear it stores longer.
Overall it was a great year for garlic. The final tally is 160 bulbs harvested. Looks like we’ll be having a savory year! You might wonder what we do with so much garlic? We eat it in just about every day in something. Garlic is so healthy we make sure to include as much of it as we can. It’s a good thing I grow my own because purchasing this much garlic throughout the year for cooking would cost a fortune. I’ll also save 15-25 bulbs for planting this fall saving myself a bundle on seed garlic too!
Have you harvested your garlic yet? What’s your favorite dish that contains garlic?
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Alternative Alliums for Your Plate
Many of us have small gardens and would never be able to grow all the bulb onions we use in a year. We can supplement those bulb onions with other alliums, it’s especially helpful if they can be grown during the off seasons and throughout the winter. Over the past couple years I’ve been adding a couple alternative alliums to the garden to fill our plates.
Leeks are a perfect stand-in for onions in winter and spring. After growing them once I wondered why I had never grown them before. I planted them in late summer and overwintered them in the garden. They were harvested throughout the winter and on into spring. It was the perfect way to supplement the storage onions. They are perfect for growing in fall/winter/spring and are quite tasty used like regular onions. If you’ve never grown leeks in the garden before I’d highly recommend giving them a try. Seeds are available from a variety of sources.
Potato Onions are planted in fall like garlic and are harvested around this time. If you plant a large onion they turn into lots of smaller onions, if you plant smaller ones they turn into large potato onions. You save onions from the previous year to replant in the fall. These onions are nice because you don’t have to buy seed, sets or plants after your initial purchase. These are nice because they’re ready much earlier than the bulging onions you plant in the garden. Shallots are very similar to potato onions, only they’re more mild. (source: Southern Exposure)
Bunching Onions are hardy onions and are harvested and used as scallions or green onions. I planted ‘Japanese White Bunching’ a few years ago and have been letting them bunch for the past couple years. I harvest them all winter long, there’s nothing like having green onions to use in the middle of winter. It would definitely be worth adding a small patch of hardy bunching onions to your garden. This year I added another variety called ‘Red Welsh’ and I can’t wait to try them this fall. (source: Japanese Bunching from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Red Welsh Bunching onion from Baker Creek)
Perennial Leeks produce small bulbs and tiny leeks from the base of the main leek plant. They’re like regular leeks only smaller with a bulbous end and you don’t need to start seeds for them each year. To propagate, you dig up the main leeks and replant the small bulbs that form around it (kind of like garlic). My initial planting of perennial leeks last year so I didn’t harvest any this spring for eating, I wanted them to multiply as much as possible. As a result, I have a nice crop of small leeks, I’ll be digging them up shortly to replant for fall/winter/spring harvests. (source: Southern Exposure)
Egyptian Walking Onions are harvested like green onions. Besides the bunching onions, they’re the earliest onions harvested each spring. They reproduce by forming little bulblets on top of the plant. The main leaf then falls over and the little bulblets produce a small bunch of onions, thus they “walk” around the garden. I started these onions a few years ago and I’ve been working on establishing a good sized patch of them since they multiply so readily and are so easy.
It’s no wonder Thomas Jefferson grew these at Monticello! (source: Southern Exposure)
It’s been really interesting researching all these different varieties of alliums and growing them in the garden. They definitely make it much easier to produce a larger percentage of the food that we eat. The thing I like most about all of these is that they produce fresh harvests during those times of the year that you’re really craving something fresh!
Do you grow any alternative alliums? Which ones? Any great advice? If not, which one do you think you’d like to try first?
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Storing Homegrown Onions
After posting about onions yesterday, everyone was asking about how I store my onions. The home in which I spent part of my childhood had a proper root cellar. It was located under the porch and had a gravel floor. As a result it stayed cold and humid. It was full of spiders and had one a lightbulb in the middle of the room – you had to open the wooden door and step into the damp dark room while feeling around for the pull cord – it was the scariest thing in the world when we were little (right up there with the basement stairs without backs). A proper root cellar like this is the best place to store crops, but many of us do not have such spaces.
Our home is like most modern homes, we have a basement, but no proper root cellar. Generally I simply store my onions in baskets on shelves in the basement. We don’t heat our basement so it stays about 50-55 degrees all winter long. A little warm for storing vegetables, but better than the upstairs. Things would store a bit longer if we could keep it cooler, but they usually store until we eat them all. The biggest challenge you will face if you don’t have a cool enough spot is that your onions will start to sprout, That’s not a huge problem since they can still be used.
I often store my onions in the workshop off the garage until the weather starts to get below freezing. In the fall it’s much cooler than our basement. If you have an enclosed porch that hovers around these temperatures that might work as well. We’ve considered turning our basement stairway into a root cellar but haven’t taken the plunge. I have friends that store their potatoes in their barns in makeshift root cellars made of bales of straw. My grandpa tells stories of them using a pit in the yard to store potatoes between layers of straw. Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition has a section that describes how to build a few different types of root cellars. Here’s an article on how to build a proper root cellar into your basement via Mother Earth News
Here are a few things that you can do to ensure longer storage of your homegrown onions.
Select the right variety. Some onions are long-keepers and are meant to be stored in root cellars, others are not. Most companies will list this information in the description. If not, head off to Google to find out. Consider starting your onions from seed or purchasing onion plants. Seed started onions generally will store longer than onions grown from sets. If you grow both, make sure you label each kind and keep them separate so you can eat the set grown onions first.
Don’t over fertilize. Onions are heavy feeders and like a lot of water, but over fertilizing can cause crown rot. It’s better to have smaller onions that keep longer than huge onions that rot. Keeping onions well watered and well weeded will help the bulbs grow larger without as much fertilizer. Eat large onions from you pantry first as they don’t seem to store as long as the smaller onions.
Cure onions before storing them. In summer the tops of your onions will flop over and the leaves will start to yellow. This signals to the plant that it’s time to get ready for the winter ahead. When the necks look dry, pull onions and allow them to cure in a warm spot to cure. Let them sit in a single layer in a warm dry location for two weeks (a garage or attic works well for this). Once the necks of the onions are completely dry you can store them in baskets in a cool dark location (35-40 degrees is best).
Check onions in storage regularly and use up those that are starting to soften or sprout first. If you notice that the majority of your onions are sprouting, cut them all up, cook them and freeze them.
You can also grow a variety of other alliums to fill in the gaps throughout the year. Here at Chiot’s Run we also grow: traditional leeks, potato onions, shallots, Egyptian walking onions, scallions, bunching onions and perennial leeks. More on these alternative alliums tomorrow.
Do you have any tips to share on storing homegrown onions?
Highly recommended reading about long term vegetable storage:
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Alliums All Year
Here at Chiot’s Run we LOVE onions and eat alliums of some form almost every day. There’s no way I would ever have enough room to grow a large enough patch of bulb onions that we could eat all year long. It would also be hard to be able to store the onions for as long as we would need to.
As a result I’ve been learning to grow and love other alliums like leeks, bunching onions, potato onions, scallions, shallots, potato onions, and perennial leeks. Most of these alternative alliums fill in the time between the last onion from the pantry and the first bulb onion harvest from the garden. I’m happy to report that since last spring we’ve been able to use our homegrown alliums almost exclusively.
This year I’m growing a few different types of long storing onions trying to find one that stores the longest.
Here are the types I’m growing:
‘Copra’ – Uniform, “rock-hard” storage onion with early maturity. These medium-sized, dark yellow-skinned storage onions have the preferred blocky round shape with thin necks that dry quickly. Firmness and skin are superior. Copra remains one of the best in our yearly storage trials, staying firm and flavorful after most other varieties have sprouted. Highest in sugar (13°-14°) of the storage onions. Adaptation: 38°-55° latitude. (source of seeds and plants: Johnny’s Seeds)
This variety was recommended by many of you and a few local friends. I started seeds in January and transplanted them to the garden in March. I also direct seeded them in the garden in March as well. One bunch of plants arrived in mid-April and they were planted shortly thereafter. The reason behind the three different growing methods is to see which ones size up the best and store the longest. There will definitely be another bog post or two about this.
‘Red Zeppelin’ – Medium to large, globe-shaped bulbs with deep red color. Red Zeppelin will store for six months or more under proper conditions. Adaptation: 38°-45° latitude. (source of seeds and plants: Johnny’s Seeds). I planted 3 bunches of these in mid-April the day they arrived and have high hopes for them because we love red onions and it can be difficult to find long storing varieties.
‘Stuttgarter’ – The old standby for yellow storage onions from sets. 2”- 3” diameter bulbs are flat bottomed and have a nice strong flavor. Excellent storage into June. For the best yields, plant as soon as the ground can be worked. (source: Maine Potato Lady) This variety of onion is raved about by Gertrud Franck in the book Companion Planting: Successful Gardening the Organic Way which I’m thoroughly enjoying right now.
‘Red Baron’ – A really nice red onion with flavor not too pungent. Great raw in salads and sandwiches. Though not as large or high-yielding as Stuttgarter, Red Baron is a nice addition to your onion bin. I’ve experienced good storage, easily into May. (source: Maine Potato Lady)
My hope is with all these different varieties our onion baskets in the pantry will still be providing bulb onions until the ‘Forum’ onions I talked about yesterday are ready to harvest. I most certainly will be happy if I can be eating caramelized onions and potatoes from the pantry next May!
What’s your favorite way to eat onions?
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Forum Onions in the Garden
Last Friday I harvested the first bulbing onions from the garden. After a few months relying on leeks and green onions to fill the onion void, it was cause for a small celebration. Most of my onions aren’t even close to being ready to harvest, more on those varieties tomorrow.
Last year I came across ‘Forum’ onions – described by Johnny’s Seeds as: Forum onion sets can be planted in the spring and yield a “green top” cooking onion by the beginning of July and a dried bulb by the end of July. This onion will fill the gap between last year’s storage onions and this year’s crop from seed. Not for long storage. Best at 37° latitude and higher.
They went into the ground the day after they arrived in the mailbox, April 12 (wish they had arrived a month earlier). I’ve been watching them and was pleasantly surprised when they started forming bulbs much earlier than my other onions, which were planted later than these.
They’re not fully formed yet, but some of the tops are flopping over already. The ones I harvested were about the size of a golf ball with one that was closing in on baseball size. They good thing is that these don’t store for very long so they’re not meant to be kept as a storage onion. They’re meant to be used up quickly making it easier to harvest them early like this.
Now that I’ve discovered this gem it will always have a place in my garden. I’ll be trying to find another variety or two early maturing onions to add alongside these. Some research produced a few early maturing short storage onions that can be grown from seed: Arsenal, Early Yellow Globe, Precedent. I’ll be searching for seeds for these varieties as well since I prefer to grow my own onions from seed rather than purchased sets or plants.
Do you have a hard time harvesting vegetables before they’re fully mature or full sized?
