I can’t help but repeat myself. Margaret Roach does it again! This time, with potatoes.
I have had hit or miss success with growing potatoes….but I may just give them another try because my favorite gardener — Margaret Roach — has put together another sensational, expert interview on how to grow potatoes!
As with her article on mulch, if you have questions, Ms. Roach has the answers.
Hope you enjoy this fact-filled Q & A and take advantage of the 15% discount from Filaree.
All right all my gardening friends who are also nerds…
This is an absolutely glorious article on the NY Times site with links to gardening aps for your phone!!
It was posted by one of my LinkedIn group (Grow Girls Grow Organic) members — Cindy Meredith. Meredith also has a gardening blog and it is packed with great info on all kinds of gardening so I expect great info but this post and link just made me smile!
Happy Easter to all my gardening friends.
Margaret Roach does it again!
And while I am working on my organic gardening manuscript….
I thought I would share links and articles from some of my most favorite organic gardeners.
This article is really an in-depth FAQ on mulch. What really constitutes mulch? How much should I use? When do I mulch?
Got mulch questions? Ms. Roach has the answers.
garden mulch: how to mulch, and what to use — A Way to Garden.
Posted in Gardening Books, Gardening Tips, Organic Gardening, Tools for the Organic Gardener
Tagged A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season, A Way To Garden; Roach, FAQ mulch; favorite gardeners, Garden, Home, Margaret Roach, Mulch, organic, organic gardeners, Organic horticulture, Plant
This will be short chapter on growing this particular fruit. It will be mercifully short because if you followed my advice, you would end up owning fruit trees
that only produce beautiful, snowy white or soft pink blossoms in the spring, a
Cherry blossoms herald Spring.
small orchard of trees that birds call home and trees that require limited care just to be…trees.
Let me pause for a moment and ask, “…would I ever tell anyone they shouldn’t plant trees and raise fruit? The answered is a qualified, I don’t know for sure.”
If you really want to grow fruit in your backyard, here’s is my best advice: read.
Read a whole lot. Read some more. Visit local nurseries and talk to the owners. By the way, I mean visit real nurseries – not Wal-Mart or Lowe’s.
Ask about the fruits you think you want to grow. Ask about the types, the challenges the number you might need to actually get your trees to set fruit. Ask about bugs, pests, blight, pestilence.
Find out which fruit trees can survive your winter, your summer, your soil. Ask just how much care they will need – feeding, weeding (some fruit trees don’t play well with weeds at their feet), pruning and wrapping. Ask questions. Listen to the answers.
When you’re all done talking, read, everything, one more time, before you make a commitment to growing your own fruit trees or planting a small orchard.
Why?
Killing trees is a lot more costly than killing seedlings. And removing the bodies requires a shovel, maybe an axe, perhaps a small tractor and always a whole lot of back-breaking digging, chopping and pulling.
Killing trees hurts, emotionally, too. I was probably a druid in a former life so when the first two peach trees I planted got Peach Leaf Curl at the tender age of 5, I fought a losing battle for another 2 years to try to save them. When my Apricot went belly up after just 2 short years, I braced her, wrapped her ravaged trunk, sprayed her with dormant oil and watched her long, slow demise over the next 12 months.
How You Should Plant Fruit Trees
Fifteen years ago, I planted my first fruit trees – 2 Montmorency Cherry trees. Today, I get between 40 and 60 quarts of sour pie cherries off just these two trees.
How did I do it? What’s the magic? Darned if I know! They came from the nursery in 5 gallon plastic buckets. I actually left the buckets on when I planted them!
And I only dug the hole just big enough and deep enough to shove the bucket into it. No compost, no fertilizer, no loosened soil, in fact, I planted them in the worst possible type of soil – actually it was silt, a fine, orange talcum powder like dirt.
And they survived, and thrived and just keep producing bumper crops of berries.
Do I recommend this willy-nilly approach to planting fruit trees? No. I just think I was plain old lucky. And I never acted so capriciously again with the lives of trees, shrubs, plants and herbs that were entrusted to me.
Rules for Planting Almost Any Fruit Tree
Pick the site. That’s basic advice but it turns out that fruit trees have some particular requirements. They need fertile soil that drains well. They need space to grow, too, so make sure the site fits the trees you want to put in the ground.
Semi-dwarf varieties should be at least 15 feet apart. Standard fruit trees need 20 feet between them. Make sure you know whether the fruit trees you want are self-pollinating or need another tree to set fruit. Plant one sour cherry tree and you’ll get fruit. Plant one apple tree and you’ll get bupkus.
If you’re planting bare root stock, make sure you soak the roots of the trees for a couple of hours before you plant them. Root stock or nursery trees should also be pruned of damaged branches and roots.
Whether planting bare root stock or container grown fruit trees, you really do have to do some preparation to give the baby trees a good start.
Once your fruit trees are established, you really need to pay attention to pruning them, every year. Pruning helps to ensure that those dwarf trees you planted don’t shoot up to 25 feet tall…and they will.
Pruning also gets rid of suckers – small branches that sap strength from the tree but produce no fruit. And it opens up the trees to more sunlight and makes it easier to see, protect and pick fruit.
When fruit sets, about 3 weeks after blooming, make sure you thin it out. Most trees set lots and lots of fruit but leaving it all on the tree will mean smaller fruit. You can take damaged or misshapen fruit off first but if you really want larger fruit, pull off most of the fruit that has set, leaving 5 to 8 inches between each remaining fruit.
Invest in a couple of books. Grow Fruit Naturally is my favorite. It’s by Lee Reich and it walks you through picking, planting, growing and harvesting fruit in detail….with pictures. Reich is also the author of the best book on the market that deals with pruning. It’s called The Pruning Book.
I have been very successful with cherries, intermittently successful with figs, never got a single apple from 3 trees, waiting for success with my pears (takes them 5 years to decide to flower – who knew) and an unmitigated disaster with peaches and nectarines.
If you ask me what made one fruit successful and the other not, I really couldn’t say. But I’ve made my peace with owning an orchard of beautiful fruit trees that produce snowy white or soft pink blossoms in the spring. I love these trees as homes for birds. And I love that they require limited care just to be…trees.
This is the final “formal” chapter in my organic gardening book. For the next 4 to 6 weeks, I will be working on formatting for Kindle, getting a covered created and preparing to publish Grow So Easy Organic Gardening on Amazon.
I have loved having all of you along for the ride and will be publishing more about gardening and growing and storing in the future but not for a few months.
But it’s spring time so you will have plenty to do in your own gardens, back yards, local garden centers and nurseries. So go! Plant!! Enjoy!!!
Posted in Gardening Tips, Organic Gardening, Tools for the Organic Gardener
Tagged Cherry, Fruit, Fruit tree, Leaf Curl, Lowe, Montmorency Cherry, Peach, Walmart
My second favorite backyard fruit is blackberries.
I tried raspberries, once. I even harvested beautiful, sweet red raspberries, once. Then I ended up with a bramble patch so thick and so full of stickers that it defied all attempts to control it. It got so bad that I actually pulled the brambles down and ran over the whole patch with our riding mower…three times.
Blackberries om varying stages of ripeness. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Now, I raise blackberries. And every year I get about 30 quarts of beautiful, deep purple, inch long berries that I make into slump, buckle and jam.
Why was my raspberry patch such a disaster? Why am I so successful with blackberries? What did I do differently?
The answer is very simple. I bought Doyle Thornless blackberry bushes. And I only bought 3 of them! No thorns, no arm wrestling with 10 plants that morphed into 20 in one season. And no scratches or flying curse words.
Choosing Blackberry Plants
When I bought them, Doyle Thornless blackberries were about the only thornless plants on the market. And they probably are the most expensive addition in my garden. Nowadays there are other thornless choices but there are really only two types of blackberry plants – trailing or erect.
Both varieties grow exactly the way they are named. Erect blackberries have arched canes that support themselves so no trellis is needed. Trailing blackberries have canes that can’t support themselves so you either have to build a trellis to support them or do what I did. This lazy gardener used the post and rail fence in her back yard as her trellis.
The fruit of erect blackberries ripens later, is a bit smaller than those of trailing blackberries and is not as big or as sweet. So you may want to trade the ease of raising erect blackberries for the taste and flavor and abundance of the trailing kind.
One last word of advice about choosing your stock. Make sure you know your hardiness zone and you know which blackberry varieties will live and play well in your zone. Blackberries are pretty tough but can be harmed by extreme temperatures so check before you buy.
Where to Plant Blackberries
Whichever kind of berry you plant, the site is very important. Sun is important but almost any soil (but very sandy soil), will work for blackberries. Surprisingly, the single most important qualification of the site for blackberry plants is water.
Blackberries need a lot of water during fruit production but are damaged by water in the winter. If water stands around the roots, winter and spring frosts can really hurt the stock. So drainage is important.
When and How to Plant Blackberries
As soon as you can work the soil in your zone, you can plant you root stock. That’s early spring in the North and late winter or early spring in the South.
As you know, I’m a lazy gardener. So the way I figure it, I give my plants a good start and the rest is up to them. Because I was planting along the fence line where nothing but crab grass and weeds had grown before, I did take a bit of time to prep the patch where I wanted to plant them.
But I didn’t get carried away and plant green manure crops like rye or vetch. Blackberries grow just wild in the woods and do fine so I decided to go the easy way. I loosened the soil by tilling it but that’s about it. No soil sample and no manure or compost was added.
Doyle Thornless blackberries trail, so I spaced them 8 feet apart. Erect varieties can be planted 2 feet apart. If you are doing more than one row of either kind, make sure you leave 10 feet between the rows so you’ll have enough room to maneuver around the plants, pick, prune and generally see to the health and happiness of your plants.
If your root stock looks dry when it arrives, soak the roots in water for several hours before trying to plant them. Use a shovel or a large fork to make a slit in the soil for each root you intend to plant. Rock the fork or shovel back and forth to make the slit wide enough to put the roots of the plant in without cramping them or breaking them off.
Once you have a hole for each root and you’re ready to plant, trim the top of each plant back to just 6 inches long. Remove each plant from the bucket of water, using the trimmed top as a “handle” and drop each root into its own slit.
On each plant, you should be able to see a line where the plant met the soil in the nursery bed. Don’t plant the root any deeper than it was planted in the nursery. As soon as the root is in the ground, firmly pack earth around it, first with your hands than with the heel of your shoe.
Once planted, I wrap a soaker hose along the entire length of the bed so I can provide a constant source of water during the growing season. Once the soaker hose is down, I mulch all of my new plants with between 4 and 6 inches of straw.
During the first year, don’t expect a lot of berries. Your plants have to establish themselves. But make sure you keep the babies watered. And make sure you mulch them heavily for their first winter.
Training and Care
Blackberries are easy to train along a fence or a trellis. I simply tie my canes to the fence in the direction I want them to grow. And I’ve learned to be a bit ruthless with which canes I keep and which canes I cut.
Erect and trailing blackberries will send out suckers and new canes. Make sure you keep an eye on both so that you don’t end up with a thicket. Even without thorns, it is hard to train, manage, harvest and prune if you are overwhelmed with too many canes.
Remember that the canes that produced last year are not going to produce in the coming year. So I wait until late August or early September to cut back the ones that I know had fruit that summer. I also take time to thin out a few of the new canes – leaving only the larger, healthier ones for next year.
You can cut suckers at this time too. But if you lost a plant or two during the season, take a few minutes to get a replacement from the new stock in your patch. To get new ones, I have two choices:
Just wait for a new sucker to push up through the ground. Let it establish itself a bit then cut a nice round bit of soil around the sucker, dig it up and transplant it where you want it.
Or, just as easy, you can take a long cane, slash it once on the bottom side and bury the slashed bit in soil.
Thinned, tied up and mulched, my blackberries are dreaming of spring again.
Once you’ve thinned, trimmed and replaced, you can simply tie up the canes you want to fruit next year then mulch with 6 to 8 inches of straw. Or, if you aren’t as lazy as I am, you can plant a cover crop over the patch that you can work into the ground, in the summer.
Whatever you do, don’t let weeds get a start in your patch. Like asparagus, blackberries don’t like competition. As big and as bold as the canes can get – some of mine are almost 2 inches in diameter, the size the fruit and quantity of the harvest will be affected if weeds get a chance to complete.
Next week, how to handle Japanese beetles and some great recipes for fresh, juicy organic blackberries.
I cannot write this morning. I’m still recovering and my brain cells need to be dusted off by warm air and sunshine. But Rick Visser can write. And he does write about topics close to my heart.
Here he posts a brief entry, an ode almost, to life at a cellular level. And he reminds me of an essay I wrote years ago for our local paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, on why I garden.
Mr. Visser goes first. When I Walk Quietly in the Morning Garden | The Hungry Gap.
And now, me.
The ground may be covered in snow but my sap still rises when I open the mail box sand see the first seed catalog nestled inside. It means it’s time to plan my garden, gather materials and seeds and descend to the basement to start growing my crops.
How do I end up knee deep in dirt, every summer?
Gardening was my Mom’s legacy. It was in the earth of the dozen gardens she grew that she taught me about living and dying and being reborn.
Gardening roots me. It grounds me in beauty and order and chaos.
It is easy to see infinity when you are surrounded by it.
Sometimes, when I am sitting on the moist earth, the sun just beginning to rise and my dogs lying by my side, I swear I can see infinity.
It is the same feeling I had when I held my first grandchild.
There, in that tiny child, I saw years and lifetimes and generations marching out before me, stacked deep and deeper behind me. The sensation was overwhelming.
In that instant, I could see my daughter, my mother, her mother and her mother before her and I knew I was holding a moment in time — never before beheld, never to come again.
In both moments, the garden and the grandchild, the veil lifts. I feel timeless, part of the past, present and future and I feel hope. If you garden, you feel it too.
Somehow, I managed to get the flu…and I am still sick, almost a week later. So I won’t be able to post today. Hopefully, I will be back and ready to tell you all about blackberries by next Saturday. Should have gotten the flu shot…
In the meantime, apologies and happy gardening to everyone.
Posted in Organic Gardening
Fruit is a joy to have in your backyard and a wondrous ingredient to pull out of the freezer or pantry in the dead of winter. Well, some fruit that is. Other fruit can be tricky, spiteful, bug-ridden, disease-laden and just a downright pain in the…ankles to try to raise.
For me, growing fruit was a bit of trip down memory lane trying to remember what my Mom raised when we were kids and how much cursing was involved.
Growing fruit was also a bit of trial and error – trying to discover what would like my soil and live in my “zone” and erring on the side of killing a few trees before their time.
But after about 2 years of planting, pruning and, okay I admit it, cursing, I mastered three types of fruit – blueberries, blackberries and Montmorency cherries and I’ve been on easy street for about 15 years, enjoying the “fruit of my labors,” immensely!
So, on to the short, sweet (oh so sweet) method of raising those three organic fruits.
Blueberries In The Backyard
Why not start with the easiest and one of the tastiest fruits first?
Blueberries win that contest hands down. Long before edible landscaping was popular, I began exploring ways to raise fruit like blueberries, one of the more expensive products you’ll find in any store. I wanted to start small so I ordered 6 bushes thinking that would be plenty for our 2-adult house.
In the end, I popped 12 blueberry bushes into a corner planting in the back yard. Why so many?
I ordered them online and waited, and waited and waited for them to be delivered. When I got my credit card bill and saw the charge from the nursery for the bushes I hadn’t received (I thought), I did a little charging of my own. I demanded they send the bushes they had charged me for.
Despite the fact that I was wrong the company immediately said okay. They shipped me 6 more bushes. About a week later, I got a call. Someone named “Pat” had actually signed for my bushes.
My husband, whose name is also Pat, had signed for the bushes, forgot to tell me and left them in the garage.
After immediate permission to charge me for the second set they shipped and multiple apologies, I slithered into the garage and located the tall, brown package from the nursery.
When I tore open the package I found white sticks with white leaves on them. My bare root stock blueberry bushes had lost all their chlorophyll!
Since the bushes had traveled so far and suffered so much, I decided to give them a chance, anyway. So, 15 years later, I am still harvesting 50 to 60 quarts 
of blueberries every summer.
Now think about that. You plant them once, care for them just a bit and they yield 240 pints of fresh, organic blueberries every year for 15 years.
If you had to buy the same number in your local grocery store, you would have paid more than $10,000 for the privilege. And you would have no idea if what you were eating was pesticide free.
I’ve been growing my own for 15 years and saving all that money every year. At a conservative estimate, that means I’ve put $10,000 in my pocket for an initial investment of less than $100!
You’re probably thinking, “Oh, I don’t have enough space.” or “I can’t grow anything.” Or my favorite, “I don’t know how.” I am here to tell you blueberries are one of the easiest fruits to grow…period. And I’m going to tell you how to do it, next week.
I LOVE this plant because you plant the crowns one year, wait two years and then reap the asparagus harvest for the next 20 years. Every spring, tips push through the earth, ready for harvesting.
Asparagus emerging from the ground every spring is a delight to any grower. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Asparagus is not quite a perennial unless you are my age…then it will outlive you!
Planting asparagus is a bit more complicated than dropping seeds into soil, watering and waiting to harvest. But I once read an article that said planting asparagus is a bit like getting married. If you do it right, you only have to do it once.
The first thing you have to do is choose your asparagus plants. One of the new male varieties will usually be more productive than the old stand bys. All-male asparagus varieties — including Jersey Giant, Jersey Supreme and Jersey Knight— produce up to three times more than older, open-pollinated male/female varieties, such as ‘Mary Washington.
Once you’ve ordered your crowns, it’s time to get the asparagus bed ready for the new babies.
Planting Asparagus
Asparagus isn’t hard to plant but it does make a few demands on the back yard gardener. For one thing, early spring is the best time to plant asparagus crowns in my neck of the woods. Once the soil can be worked but frost is still hitting the back yard. So, if you live in the Mid-Atlantic region, planting should be done between April 15 to May 15.
Asparagus has some very specific requirements but you only have to plant it once to enjoy more than 20 years of production. And there are really only a few steps to follow that will make your asparagus grow healthy and give you fresh, succulent green shoots every spring.
Step I – Choose the site wisely. Asparagus likes sunshine – a lot of it. Make sure the spot you choose will not be disturbed for 20 to 25 years.
Step 2 – Dig a trench that is 18 inches deep and 24 inches wide. If your soil is heavy, make sure you loosen it to a depth of 24 inches because asparagus likes good drainage.
Step 3 – Add a layer of organic matter to your trench – 4 inches of chopped leaves or pine needles or compost or rotted cow manure and dig it in a bit with a fork. Asparagus likes rich, fertile soil. Sprinkle on a light dusting of bone meal and your ready to plant!
Step 4 – Once the bed is ready, carefully take out each crown, spread its roots and place it in the trench with its buds facing up. Give each crown some room to grow, spacing them about 15 inches apart to allow for root growth.
If your trench is 30 feet long, you should be able to put 24 crowns in the ground. When I planted my asparagus, I made 2 trenches about 15 feet long each with a 2 foot wide path between each trench.
Step 5 – cover the crowns with soil but only 1 to 2 inches of soil, initially. Over the next few months, you will gradually fill in the trench as the crowns put out their first spears. NOTE: DON’T HARVEST ANY SPEARS the first year.
If you harvest in the first year, you will stress the new crowns and may reduce your asparagus crop every year thereafter. And, by the way, ONLY HARVEST the first 2 or 3 weeks of the next year (the second year your crowns are in the ground). Again, over-harvesting can damage and, in some cases, even kill the crown. So patience…or you might regret it for the next 20 years.
Making Asparagus Happy
Once the spears are starting to grow up through the soil and you are keeping them lightly covered with soil, your primary job in year one is to keep weeds from growing up around the asparagus.
But don’t till around the asparagus. The crowns don’t like being disturbed. So you can hand weed one or two times a week. Or you can use table salt to kill off some weeds (asparagus is more tolerant of salt than other plants). But I take care of weeds in the asparagus bed the same way I do my whole garden – with mulch.
Once the trenches are leveled off, I put 4 inches of straw on either side of the bed and straight down my walking path. Weeds are suppressed; water is held in and the asparagus spears are pretty well protected from my dancing West Highland terriers. And the mulching approach works all year long.
Keeping Asparagus Happy
Setting up the asparagus bed just so means you will have happy asparagus crowns for decades to come. Once the plants are established, keeping them happy is really very easy.
Don’t harvest every spear of asparagus. Taking all the asparagus means the crown has nothing to help it replenish itself. Year 3, you can harvest for the first 4 weeks. Year 4 and beyond, you should be able to harvest everything for 6 to 8 weeks but note…
There are some sure signs that you should start getting a bit particular about what you harvest. To ensure that your asparagus plants stay healthy from year to year, ALWAYS STOP HARVESTING when 3/4ths of the spears are down to pencil – size, about 3/8ths of an inch in diameter.
Also, oddly-shaped spears and woody spears are indications that your harvest season is over.
Asparagus spears left in the ground plume, adding beauty to the garden and protecting the crowns.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Once you stop harvesting, let the remaining spears in the patch grow up and fern. These ferns aren’t just nice to look at. They offer protection to the asparagus crowns so Do NOT cut the ferns down, even in the fall.
Let them overwinter because they protect the crowns from freezing. I usually cut and remove the dead ferns in late February. And I mean remove them. They are taken out onto the back acre and piled up with the brush that will be burned in March or April.
Make sure you side dress asparagus with some nice, rich compost every spring. And make sure you mulch heavily (3 to 4 inches of straw) around the rows to stop weeds from growing in the patch. Then sit back and wait for that glorious, first harvest of fresh asparagus.
This is my final post on growing organic vegetables. I will post three more growing stories — on blueberries, blackberries and sour pie cherries. And then, I’ll be on to prepping this manuscript for publication on Kindle!
So, next week, how I harvest 60 quarts of blueberries every year from just one corner of my yard!
Red onions are my favorite and it’s easier and cheaper to raise them organically, so why not? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In my early gardening years, way back in the dark ages when I had a stick and some dirt, I never, ever considered raising onions in my garden.
I didn’t use a lot of onions in my cooking, well to be honest, I didn’t cook much, either. I was a road warrior and spent most of my life in a plane, on a train or riding in a limo. There was no dirt under my nails, no canning jars in my pantry and no garden in my back yard.
Besides, my Mom never raised onions or garlic. But then, my Mom wasn’t married to an Italian. So when I traded in all my gold credit cards and came home to life on the homestead, I decided to give onions a try.
Getting Onions In The Ground
My first experience with raising them was hilarious. I decided to start them from seed. One cold and windy day in early March, I went out, worked the soil loose with my hand rake and spread seeds. I was a little liberal with the amount of seed I put down but I’d never done it before.
And onion seed is small and dark. It disappeared right into the soil. I covered the seeds with a tiny bit of soil, covered the bed with a fence section and a sheet and went back inside to thaw out and promptly forgot I’d planted onion seed.
Four weeks later, in the middle of April. I was preparing a bed for beets. There is no finesse involved in prepping and planting these babies and the seeds are so big, I didn’t need my glasses, I thought.
I knelt down by the bed and was stunned to see a ton of baby grass growing in the bed. I grabbed handfuls and began madly tearing out what I thought were weeds. About 3 minutes later I froze; I was tearing up baby onions!
I tend to use sets, now.
Seed or Sets
Raising onions from seed is easy as long as you remember that you planted it and don’t rip it out, willy nilly. Once the seeds sprout and the onion babies get to be 3 inches high, all you have to do is thin and transplant them using the same technique I use for baby beets.
Raising onions from sets is easy too but your choices are limited to what your favorite, organic seed company is growing. I prefer red onions so I usually end up with Stuttgart or Candy Red. Both are good tasting, sweet onions but only the Stuttgart is a long keeper.
Depending on whether you are planting long or short day, you can put onion seed in the ground as soon as you can work the soil in the spring. If you’re going for sets, the best time to order your sets is early. If you don’t order early, you may not get the varieties you want. Raising onions in the backyard is getting more popular and nurseries run out of sets pretty early.
White, Red or Yellow
Onions come in quite a few colors – that would be your first choice. They also come in long day, short day and intermediate. Clearly, the names refer to how long the onions take to mature. And picking the right onion for your zone and growing season is important to how well the onions grow and how big and healthy they are.
Like many plants, onions grow roots and leaves first then begin to form bulbs but only when daylight hours reach a particular length. Onions are what’s known as “photoperiodic.” That means they regulate their growth by the duration of light and dark at the time of year they are growing.
If you try a long day onion in the deep South, you’ll get great tops but very small bulbs which will be killed when exposed to too much heat. A short day onion that’s planted in the north will try to produce bulbs before the leaves have formed. Without leaves to supply food, the bulb won’t be able to develop and size of the bulb will be limited.
So, rule of thumb, plant long day varieties if you live north of latitude 36º — roughly the Kansas/Oklahoma border. Plant short day types south of this line. Put long day varieties in the ground as early as possible in the spring. Put short day onions in the ground in the fall to give them a head start in the spring.
Planting Onions
If you are putting onion sets in the ground, most organic companies will ship them to you in the fall and within 2 weeks of the optimum time for you to plant. When the sets arrive, they may appear wilted but they are pretty hardy and should do well if you plant them quickly.
NOTE: if you cannot plant as soon as they arrive, soak the roots in water and either keep them in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks or mound soil around the roots and keep them moist.
When you are ready to transplant, simply trim the tops to about 3 inches high and the roots to ¼ of an inch. I use a sharpened pencil to create a hole for each set that’s about 1 to 2 inches deep – deep enough to cover the white part of the baby onion. I plant the sets about 4 to 6 inches apart, in rows about 18 inches apart.
Make sure you plant the baby onions as directed above because they don’t like to compete for foods and fertilizer with each other or other plants, including weeds. In fact, there’s a saying in the onion business – you can grow onions or weeds but not both.
When planting in the fall, mulch heavily – I use 14 to 18 inches of straw to cover the whole bed.
Mulching keeps the plants from sprouting during the January thaw and prevents the freezing and heaving cycle when warmer days play tag with the cold temperatures of deep winter.
In the spring, when forsythia start to bloom, pull the stacked straw off the plants but leave a light layer of mulch. The mulch suppresses weeds. Put a light cover over your baby onions if frost is predicted. I use old sheer curtains. Water onions regularly; they need about an inch of water a week. And that’s about it.
Harvesting & Storing Onions
Onions are ready for harvest when the tops turn yellow and begin falling over. For those that are not quite ready, you can finish bending the tops so they are horizontal to the ground using your hand. Bending the leaves stops sap from rising into the leaves and forces the bulb to mature.
When the outer skin on the onion dries, remove from the soil, brush the earth off each onion, clip the roots and cut the tops back to 1 inch from the bulb. Store onions in a cool, dry place and try not to let them touch each other. If handled properly, onions can last up to 1 year in storage.
Onion Pests & Diseases
Onions are pungent so they tend to repel most pests. Onions can also be inter-planted to repel pests from other plants, too. The bigger risk for onions are fungal diseases. It is also a risk that is very easily mitigated.
Smut, downy mildew and pink root are common problems encountered while raising onions. The easiest way to avoid all three of them is rotation. Do NOT plant onions or garlic in a bed where other allium crops have been planted the year before and, preferably, two years before.
In fact, the longer you can avoid planting onions in a bed that was used for raising alliums, the better.
By the way, if you want to find out everything about onions…just visit the National Onion Association read the FAQs and browse the types, colors and recipes.
Recipes
I love raw onions in salads, on the top of black bean soup and on dishes of beans and feta cheese. But my favorite way to eat onions is caramelized. A stick of butter in a cast iron pan, toss in about 8 onions and just cook until they are the color of caramel and salty/sweet. They are good plain, they are great on hamburgers.
And they are great in Onion Frittata — a recipe that owes a whole lot of its flavor and richness to caramelized onions.
RECIPE: Onion Frittata
INGREDIENTS:
8 large eggs
1 cup grated parmesan cheese
3 basil leaves torn in pieces
3 minced sage leaves
1tsp minced rosemary
3 T olive oil
1 or 2 c sliced onions
1 ½ to 2 cups ricotta cheese
Kosher salt and fresh pepper to taste
DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 400°
Put olive oil in large, cast iron frying pan and heat.
Put onions in frying pan and cook until just turning brown and starting to caramelize.
Reduce heat to low.
While onions cook, whisk eggs, parmesan cheese, basil, sage, rosemary salt a pepper together.
Pour egg mixture into frying pan over onions.
Spoon dollops of ricotta over the top and cook on the stove top until frittata begins to set.
Place frying pan in oven and bake for 7 to 9 minutes until it is set.
Slide frittata onto plate or serve from frying pan by cutting into slices. Serve hot or cold.
Growing garlic is just about as easy as growing onions as I shared in an earlier post.
Grow So Easy Organic 