185 onions and 50 cloves of garlic from an area about 6 square metres in the veggie bed was a very exciting harvest for us last week! We were especially pleased with the onions – 95% of them had really big healthy bulbs, and some were just ridiculously huge! If you haven’t guessed, we love onion and garlic. There’s hardly a meal we cook without the two essential flavour enhancers.

We grew three kinds of onions – White Sweet Spanish, Cream Gold and some other type we picked up from the local nursery. We grew them from seed at different times throughout May, June and July, and later transplanted the seedlings into an area in the garden that had just moderately rich soil. If onions are planted in really rich soil, they can put all their energy into leaf growth, and not much into the bulb growth. About 5% of our onion harvest was like that – all leaf and not much bulb.

We were a bit early with growing them in May and June actually. Onions are meant to be biennial, meaning they flower in the second year of growth. So you can imagine our surprise when our onions started going to seed in late November! Next time we’ll grow them after the winter solstice in June. Apparently if you plant them before this change in daylight, it can confuse them and they can start to go to seed in the first year.

We snapped all the flower shoots off, and harvested the onions after they started dying back. To ensure the onions will store well, it’s best to wait until the onions have fully died back before harvesting. But as ours were going to flowers, and rain was looking eminent, we harvested them early. We’re drying them on our airy drying racks on the back veranda at the moment, and will move them to a darker place to help them keep for longer soon. Hopefully this harvest will last us many months!