Best Harvest Ever!
I’m a lover of onions and can never seem to grow enough of them. Over the past couple years, I’ve been augmenting my bulb onions with other alliums (read my post about alternative alliums here). Even so, I always run out of onions and other alliums and end up buying a few at the farmers market. This year might be the first year I don’t have to.
The main crop of storage onions was harvested last week, here’s a look at what I have to squirrel away in the larder. They’re drying in the upstairs of our garage where it’s nice & warm. It’s quite impressive I must say, I’ve never had enough space to grow this many onions. If you can believe it, this is only 3/4 of my crop, there are some still growing in the garden to be harvested in a few weeks.
The main varieties I grew were: Copra, Australian Brown, Sedona, Cortland, and Redwing. I had seeds for Ailsa Craig, but somehow they didn’t get started, I guess the seed packet got lost in the shuffle. I also started seed for a red torpedo onion, which never germinated.
I already have a long row of leeks in the garden for next spring and three different kinds of bunching onions as well. The perennial leek bulbs will be planted soon, along with the potato onions and shallots as well. Little by little, I’m achieving allium independence – which is a beautiful thing if you consume as many alliums as we do. This large crop of onions will save me a good deal on groceries, looks like I can buy more of my favorite chocolate (which happens to be Taza).
Do you grow alliums in your garden? How many different kinds do you grow?
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It’s Tart!
Yesterday, Mr Chiots and I picked sour cherries at my mom’s house. She planted new trees a few years ago after her old one in the back blew over in a storm.
We picked most of them, totaling about a pound. I whipped up a batch of my grandma’s famous pie crust and made a slab pie.
Mr Chiots happily enjoyed a slice with ice cream last night for a snack. Sour cherries are one of my most favorite fruit, hopefully next year we’ll be adding a few trees to our garden.
What’s your favorite fruit?
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Surprise Harvest
When I was harvesting my garlic earlier this week I got a bonus harvest: potatoes.
Last year the area where the garlic was planted was used to grow a crop of potatoes. Invariably a few of the tiny potatoes hide in the soil, overwinter, and grow into small potato plants. They never produce heavy yield of potatoes, but you’ll find one or two small potatoes when you pull up the plant.
I ended up with a small potato harvest along with my garlic harvest. Since I happened to making a big pot of beef stew that day, I scrubbed them up and threw them in the pot. I’m always happy for an unexpected harvest of things I didn’t plant!
Do you ever have volunteer potatoes?
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A Bountiful Garlic Harvest
Earlier this week I harvested my garlic. This is now the third year that I’ve grown garlic and this was my best harvest yet. I harvested over 125 heads of 8 different varieties. This year I finally have a large enough harvest that I’ll be able to use some of them to plant this fall, thus saving myself about $30 or more. Since the area that I planted them was an odd shape, I didn’t do a very good job keeping the varieties separate. That’s OK with me, I’ll save the biggest and best heads for planting this fall.
You may be wondering what I’ll do with so much garlic – eat it of course. I use a lot of garlic when cooking because it’s super healthy. I’m also hoping to make some pickled garlic since I finally have enough.
Remember when I talked about harvesting the garlic scapes so that the heads would be bigger? I left a few scapes on to see if it really made a difference. As you can see the one on the left is smaller than the three heads on the right. That was the one with the scape still attached. So not only do you get the eat the scapes in spring, but you end up with more garlic some summer!
All of this garlic was planted last fall. I didn’t really do anything to it this spring but give it a watering with some Neptune’s Harvest . Garlic doesn’t take up much space in the garden, you can even plant it in your ornamental borders if you don’t have space in the your garden. My garlic bed was roughly 40 sq ft tucked in the perennial border by the driveway.
I’m pretty happy that I’ll have enough garlic to last me throughout the coming year. Growing garlic is a great way to save money because organic local garlic can be quite pricey. At our local farmer’s market it averages about $1.50 for each head. If I were to buy all the garlic I grew it would cost me $187.50. Not that I would buy that much garlic if I were purchasing it, but I sure will use it all since I grew it! Looks like we won’t have to worry about vampires this coming year!
How much garlic do you go through during the course of a year? Do you grow it in your garden?
Not sure when your garlic is ready to harvest? See this post for info.
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Fresh Eating
There’s something quite wonderful about harvesting something and eating it it within minutes, or while in the garden as I do with black raspberries and other things. Yesterday I was going to fry up some duck eggs for breakfast and was trying to figure out what to have on the side. I considered zucchini & mushrooms, but we’d had those for dinner the night before. Then I remembered that it was time to start harvesting new potatoes.
I have read that harvesting new potatoes actually increases yield since it allows the potato plants to put more energy toward sizing up the remaining smaller potatoes. I’ve never harvested a lot of new potatoes before so we’ll see how many tiny potatoes I have when harvesting this year. It’s not quite as easy as “reach into the soil around plants and pluck a few potatoes for your basket”. I don’t know what kind of soil these people have that write these tips but there’s no “reaching” into the soil. I use a trowel and gently search for a potato or two around the base of each plant. These potatoes were sauteed in bacon great with a few leeks and garlic and sprinkled with some parsley when they were finished.
Do you harvest new potatoes? What’s your favorite way to eat potatoes for breakfast?
