It’s onion time! We used transplants that we got from our local feed store Atwater Feed (the best local feed store btw!) The plants looked great and should do quite well. As you can tell from the picture below there are red onions and yellow onions (the reds look red and the yellows look yellow if you want to know what’s going to make what!) White onions and garlic will be added to the mix they just weren’t on hand at the time..
Prepping the planting bed was easy as our soil was still moist-ish from the rain last week so it was super easy to pull out some old eggplants that were left from the summer crop and clean up the weeds in the to be planted area. Once the area was clear I fired up the old Troy-Bilt rototiller and did a light till to loosen the soil to make it easy to make a few rows to put the bulbs in. You can put the bulbs on flat ground as well but defining the “planting area” from the “walking area” helps to guide little feet away from small plants…. it doesn’t always work 100% but it does seem to help.
The kids wanted to help once it came to planting so using a dowel that was about the same size as the baby bulbs a row of holes was formed about an inch or so deep (just enough to cover the top of the onion bulb) and 5-6” apart. All measurements are just eyeballed as you can see by how incredibly straight the rows are 😉 so may depths and distances may vary slightly but the end results are pretty much the same! The kids followed the line of holes dropping the bulbs in and tamping the soil around them until all the bulbs had new homes at which point they ran off to do something more exciting. After everything was in I grabbed the hose with a shower nozzle and gave everything a good soaking. While watering the turkey came wandering by to see what was going on and taking one look at all the nice green leaves poking out of the ground he started plucking them out one by one (he only got 2!) as soon this started happening he was promptly escorted into the chicken run until a net or fence can be put up and I went back to watering!
One cool thing I learned about onions… Each shoot or leaf represents one layer of the onion bulb itself and the bigger the size of the leaf the larger the bulb, I’ll have to remember this when they get harvested and see if it’s true.
