Fun with onions
Easy or hard to grow? The allium family likes to keep me guessing. In other news, a superbly cozy result in the naturally heated propagation polyhouse. Plus a brief weather-related rant.
I don’t eat onions. But everyone around me does, so I try to grow some every year. ‘Try’ being the key word, here. I seem to have no luck at all growing anything in the onion family from seed. Except when I do. (Mysterious.)
Red onions, spring onions, leeks, garlic chives—year after year, barely a result. You know how the experts say to transplant leeks into the ground, once they’re about as thick as a pencil? I could get old and die, waiting for my weedy little leeks to resemble a writing instrument. Hope springs eternal, but it’s never happened yet.
Now and then I resort to buying a handful of baby leek plug plants from our friends at the organic farm. When they have flats of leftover plants, I can pick them up for 50p each. Their leeks turn into pencils in no time, and from that stage onward they grow just fine in my garden. Like I said, mysterious.
My perennial onion greens, on the other hand, have grown like gangbusters from seed. Like a giant mega chive, perennial onion greens stay vibrant and juicy pretty much all year round. In their very first summer, I bagged up one of the gorgeous, giant purple blossoms, carefully capturing and saving its remarkable seeds for sowing the following year. I really needn’t have bothered. They’re quite good at taking care of that bit all by themselves.
The original plants are 3 years old now and still growing strong, plus they’ve liberally self-seeded all around themselves in the adjacent beds. Perennial onion weeds, they are.
Last autumn, I simply grabbed one of the spent flower heads and shook its seeds into an empty bed. And walked away. That empty bed is now full of extremely happy perennial onion greens. If only all my onions behaved this way.
Why don’t I just grow onions from sets (bulbs, in other words, not seeds) instead? I have. I would. But even that’s no guarantee. Last year something came along and ate every single one, before they had half a chance to establish themselves. (I thought critters are supposed to be repelled by onions?) Anyway, hence the unintentionally empty onion bed, just waiting to be filled by yet more perennial onion greens.
Last summer, when we took our second natural agriculture course, the farmer generously gifted us afterward with bags of fresh produce, and several plug plants for growing that season; plus a number of mature plants to overwinter and produce seed for the following year’s seed saving. (Saving your own seed is a big part of their natural agriculture practice.) Onions were among these.
Our beds were full, so we repotted the onion plug plants and overwintered them in the greenhouse. The big yellow onions intended for seed saving, spent the winter in an unheated kitchen. Both kinds were planted out a few days ago, into that same bed with the surplus perennial onion greens. Fingers crossed, maybe we’ll get some actual onions—and happy onion seeds—this time.
Meanwhile, in polyhouse #3…
The natural heating system is up and running, and it’s absolutely brilliant. The meter-square bin of horse poo/stable chippings has held an astonishingly steady temperature of 70 degrees celsius (158 farenheit) for going on 3 weeks now. That’s phenomenal.
The key, we’ve learned (the hard way), is not to let the contents of the bin dry out. If it goes dry it stops working, and the temperature drops like a stone. The answer couldn’t be simpler: A leftover piece of polyhouse plastic (or you could use empty plastic compost bags or similar) covering the exposed top of the heap. Moisture is held in, and just like that, a warm, comfy polyhouse is the result.
Never one to leave an already good thing un-maximized, Steve has added a nifty sort of bedouin tent to keep the heat from escaping out the top vents of the polyhouse. The tent has so far kept the ambient temperature remarkably toasty in there, day and night.
The other night we had a frost; the low inside polyhouse #1 was zero degrees celsius (32 farenheit). The low inside polyhouse #3, with its hotbin and tent, was 4 degrees (39 farenheit).
That’s pretty amazing, because even the experts say a cubic meter-sized hotbin will only heat the ambient temperature of a space by a maximum of two degrees, compared to the outdoor temperature. (It’s only the racks that sit directly atop the hotbin itself, that reach the balmy temperatures required for seedling germination.)
Unheated polyhouse #1 tends to stay a couple of degrees warmer than outside—it’s the magic of plastic, which is inherently more insulative than greenhouse glass. So if polyhouse #1 was two degrees warmer than outside…that means polyhouse #3 was probably six degrees (that’s eleven degrees in farenheit-speak) warmer than outside.
Good job Steve!
On a different but related topic, a short rabbit-hole rant
It’s rained almost every day for the last seven or eight months. I know this is Britain, and all, but that’s not normal. You’re probably nodding to yourself and thinking, ‘Ah, yes. Climate change.’
Uh-huh. Maybe. Or maybe it’s this:
Early most mornings (before most people get up), multiple planes streak their tic tac toe plumes across a usually blue sky. The streaks feather outwards, carried by the wind, slowly fanning out to join up with each other. By an hour or two later, the sky is completely overcast white, the sun a sickly weak spot glowing faintly behind the haze. Within a day or so of this semi-permanent whiteness, it starts to rain—and keeps on raining. For days and days. And days. And then the tic tac toe process starts all over again.
Coincidence?
You decide.
Anyway. Back to the rain itself: We’re keeping up the springtime garden maintenance as best we can, between downpours. But I keep putting off sowing seeds for all my crops, because I don’t want to see the little baby seedlings drown out there.
Ordinarily I’d start sowing in late February, early March at the latest. Polyhouse #3 would be chock full of seedling trays by now, the tiny plants all germinating in those luxuriously optimal conditions. Yet as you can see from the photo above, it’s pretty much a ghost town in there.
But it can’t really wait any longer: This is prime time now, for sowing. Spring is bustin’ out all over.
At least the dill and parsley seeds have already been tucked into their warm growing bed inside the heated polyhouse—the start of the tasty herb experiment—and a lone tray of germinating broadbean seedlings will soon outgrow their modules; hopefully they’ll then be ready to risk transplanting in the soggy outdoors.
Chili, pea and tomato sowings start today. Here we go, spring, ready or (possibly) not.
At least we can be confident that all the baby spring seedlings will stay wonderfully toasty as they grow, thanks to their beautiful new incubator polyhouse.
And after that? I just hope they can learn how to swim.