gemini://ur.gs/blog/harvesting-onions/

It's been a busy few months on the allotment since I last posted. Plenty going on, but the big news is that I am now self-sufficient for onions!

This is half of the crop: 43 onions (one isn't visible). I planted some sets out in April, on a whim (I wasn't planning to grow any this year), then felt bad for the left-over sets and planted those too, a month later. Successional planting isn't actually a very good idea with onions, and that second planting is looking a bit weedy compared to this one, but I'll make the best of it.

When onions are ready to harvest, the green tops start to fall over; once around half of the crop has done that, you bend over the neck of the remaining ones, pull them, and set them out in a dry, airy place to start drying out. These onions are bred for storage - if they're harvested in optimum conditions and "cured" correctly, they might last for a whole year after harvest - at which point the new crop of onions will be ready. Plant enough of them each year, and you'll never have to buy an onion again.

Did I plant enough? ~100 onions is ~2/week for the whole family, which might be a bit short. I'm planning to get some more in the ground in September - onions can be overwintered, which moves the harvest from July/August to June/July, so that cuts me down to 11 months to cover. You can also pull and eat onions before they form bulbs, so hopefully that'll be enough to get us by. It's quite a feeling!

I also started leeks from seed in May, in a temporary seed bed. These got transplanted this week, and should be ready from December.

It turns out the allotment has a patch of wild garlic too - but by the time I noticed, harvest time was over. I'll be watching for it next year! Living in Devon when I was a kid, we used to forage for this stuff along riverbanks - the leaves are delicious, but also the flowers. They grow enclosed in a sort-of pod, and if you pick them before they flower, they're amazing - fresh, cooked, or even pickled. The seed they set is also garlicky and lovely, but mostly pickled.

The most backbreaking thing I've done so far is to set up a crop of sweetcorn. I've got a big 8M² field into which I crammed ~200 seeds, back in May. I'd covered it in cardboard over winter to keep the weeds down, but I needed to dig, furrow, and then plant. And wait.

And wait. And wait. Looking back, I missed every single opportunity to improve germination rates, so from the ~150 seeds, I got perhaps 35 plants. I'd gone for direct sow in the belief that 200 plants was too many to manage in seed modules, and planting them out would be a pain, which is kind-of true, but at the same time, this is my main crop and I couldn't really allow it to fail.

I still had 50 seeds, so in June I got them into an emergency seed bed (the one the leeks are in now, actually). I still missed some tricks to improve germination rates (pre-soaking, for instance), but managed to get pretty much all of them to germinate, and finished transplanting them out to fill in some of the gaps in the field. So I'm still well short of what I'd hoped to grow on this field, but it is at least worthwhile. 1-3 cobs per plant mean I could stlil end up with 160 cobs of corn, which is respectable - maybe 16kg of cobs.

Still, I learned a lot for next year. Also, weeding this field has been an incredibly time sink. I was hand-weeding for much of it, but switched to a dutch hoe this month which has helped a bit. Still, it's a huge time sink.

The "three sisters" are sweetcorn, beans, and squash. I'm growing all three, but I was too much of a wimp to put them all in the same area. With the benefit of hindsight, that was a blessing this year - I've been walking all over the sweetcorn field with weeding and transplanting and would have done a lot of damage to the squash if they'd been planted together. On the other hand, it's not very space-efficient. I'll probably try co-locating them next year.

Anyway, here's the squash, which has been a joy to grow. 8/10 seeds germinated and it's quite vigorous:

I chose a "landrace" - Desert Spirit - which means the plants should show a fair bit of variety, and I do see that in their fruits. It creeps along the ground and I could see it helping to suppress weeds when interplanted with the sweetcorn.

The beans have been a different story. With the help of a friend, I built them a frame and planted them out in late April, and they... yup, failed to germinate. I got four plants out of ~60 seeds. Again, the soil was too cold - I was being impatient. The seeds rotted and/or were eaten by hungry critters. The plants that did come up were devoured by other hungry critters, leaving an empty bed. Completely empty. No beans.

I'd planted a borlotti variety, and I was hoping to harvest them dried for storage into winter. Fortunately, the previous allotment tenant had left behind a bunch of seeds, including some regular French runner beans, so I planted them in the emergency seed bed at the same time as the sweetcorn. The good thing about planting too early is that you have time to plant a bit late! A neighbour also came through with four extremely vigorous plants he'd grown from seed and didn't have room for. So, despite the failures, I've got a fully populated bean frame with red flowers showing up all over - I just won't be able to store them dried. They should be fine to freeze, though.

Also completely unexpected, but much appreciated, were six broad bean plants left on the communism table at the entrance to the allotments. i'd not thought to plant any, and had to scramble to find somewhere to put them, but they matured early and provided us with ~800g of pods over the course of this month. I should definitely plant more of them next year - I seem to have planted relatively few things for an early summer harvest this year.

Just a quick note to say that it isn't dead after all. A week after my last post lamenting its demise, it started pushing spears up through the mulch. I didn't know when it had been introduced, and you're supposed to leave it alone for the first three years, so I decided not to harvest anything this year - but later learned from an allotment neighbour that it had been planted at least five years ago, so I missed an opportunity here. Another one for next year.

Rhubarb, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, strawberries, and raspberries have been popping up since June in various quantities. I got 1kg gooseberries off a single bush, and they were incredible. Of the various currants, the blackcurrants have been by far the best, but when fresh they have a taste that's taken me a bit of getting used to. It's nice, but almost wine-like - nothing like Ribena. We've had ~1.5kg of them, anyway, most of which are in the freezer. Strawberries and raspberries are still going strong - just like last year, they provide the baby with his daily fruit, with a bit left over for us from time to time.

The rhubarb is incredibly prolific. I've harvested ~20kg so far this year, and it's barely made a dent on what's available - I could double that tomorrow if I wanted. I've given maybe half of it away so far, and have the rest preserved, either dried or frozen. I do want to try pickling some, and perhaps making a rhubarb syrup. However, the best thing to do with it is "Icelandic Rhubarb Bars"

There's more butter in these than rhubarb, but they are absolutely delicious and definitely contibute to a happy marriage.

Oh, and it turns out we have a peach tree on the allotment. I thought it was a cherry. It's only given us a single fruit though. I may replace it for next year.

The aubergine plants I was so concerned with in my last post have survived, although I wouldn't necessarily say they've thrived. They spent a long time sat in a stunted state, with very few leaves - I think it was a mixture of them being too cold, and me over-watering and under-fertilising them. I finally relented and gave them some organic chicken manure fertiliser while reducing the watering frequency to twice-weekly, and they recovered somewhat. I've got flowers, but no fruit - exactly where I was in April.

No pictures. I am somewhat disgruntled by the aubergines and probably won't try them again next year.

The tomatoes, by contrast, have been a joy. They germinated copiously, and I managed to get all 30 planted into a single greenhouse (since the aubergines were taking up so much space). They're a bit crowded, but every time I go in it smells amazing, and I am getting some small fruits. There's a lot of green tomatoes in there, so I'm hopeful this will pick up through August and September and it can start to make a significant dent in my tomato buying. There's no chance of becoming self-sufficient in them, though - we get through ridiculous quantities.

Giving them more space might be possible next year if we skip aubergines - 16 plants per greenhouse would be much more sensible, and might let the fruits be larger. I managed to get 30kg of compost (produced from our garden waste bins) off of the local council, which has been a great soil improver for the tomato greenhouse, and I've been feeding them with an organic seweed-based liquid feed as well, but there's probably more I could do there. They've not had any chicken manure yet.

The peppers have been a mixed bag. I've got a pot of chillis growing outside the house in a hanging basket, which are developing nicely enough - although the foliage is turning a funny colour. I think it needs feeding as well!

Of the ~30 capsicum seeds I planted, only 5 germinated, so they have the third greenhouse to themselves. I haven't converted that one back to an earth floor yet, so they're in pots. They suffered pretty badly when we took a week's holiday at the start of July (up to Shetland to work on the house there - more on that in another post) - but have bounced back really well and we have ~20 fruits growing, somehow. Fingers remain crossed for them.

I've been keeping a running count of things I've harvested; so far I'm at ~16,000kcal, which I calculate to be about 0.75% of our annual calorific demand, ignoring dog and cat (~6000kcal/day). So we've got a long way to go. About half of those calories are in the onions I harvested this week, and which prompted me to get writing again. The fruit are much more energy-dense, but the quantity is less, of course - except for the rhubarb, which is difficult to eat in huge quantities without also getting through a lot of sugar.

The three sisters should provide the bulk of the calories remaining to come out of the allotment; back in January, I was hoping for 25,000kcal of sweetcorn, but I probably won't make even half that. Hitting ¼-⅓ of the family's calorie intake is probably not going to happen, but it will be interesting to see how wide of the mark we are.

I already mentioned trying to overwinter onions; I've got broccoli and carrot seeds coming too. Those should provide a decent boost over autumn and into winter. You can "clamp" carrots to store them, which might be worth a try.

I've not done any salad yet, so that will be a focus over autumn and into winter. I've got winter purslane seeds coming too, but I'll also try a bunch of stuff inside as the greenhouses get freed up.

The allotment has a blackberry stand, which I've managed to keep in fairly good order, and the apple tree at home is looking weighed down with fruit. I'm also going to be foraging for plums a fair bit over August and September - there's a lot of trees around, but I was a bit late to it last year. I think it's reasonable to count foraged food towards the total. In that vein, I'm also on the lookout for sweet chestnut trees in the vicinity - we always used to forage them as kids. You can get a lot of calories very quickly that way, and they're absolutely delicious.

That picture also shows off a refreshed woodchip surface around the greenhouse holding the peppers. Maintenance work, weeding, pruning, composting, watering - it's constant effort and I've not really talked about it above. Just let it be known that I'm putting an hour or so per day into this. Very inefficiently, I'm sure, but human labour will definitely be the limiting factor on a larger plot.

Harvesting onions

Other alliums

Sweetcorn

The other two sisters

Asparagus

Culinary fruits

Nightshades

Coming up