10/21: Onions and Garlic

Backyard Grocery:
As you may know, this was our first year to actually try to grow our own food. We did lots of reading books and on the internet, but it's never the same as getting your hands dirty.

We got seeds for white and red bunching onions, and white and red big onions. My mouth watered as I made the seed tapes, spacing the seeds just so.

Mid Spring I sprinkled a few bunching onion seeds in the kiddie pool where we had broccoli (we didn't harvest it before it bloomed - ooops) and lettuce. We've harvested a few of them but I guess not enough germinated or maybe they were picked up by birds or maybe we didn't sprinkle enough.

Then I made the mistake of planting the onions in with the soybeans. Okay, now we remember that those two are the OPPOSITE of companion plants. The soybeans grew ok but probably would have done better without the onions. As for the onions ... not even one sprouted. So much for that plan. Onions HATE beans. We'll remember next year.

As for garlic, we bought the bulbs to plant, but that was before we decided to move in the Spring. Can't really plant them this Fall, can we?

So, this Winter, either we can buy fresh onions and garlic from the store and hope they are local and not contaminated or we can get dehydrated. Dried sounds better, just in case prices go up further, or we get snowed in just when we need them. So we went to Vitamin Cottage and bought out the store for onion flakes and garlic flakes. The are pretty cheap, so we got enough to last through to next Summer, probably. Also got "dehydrated soup vegetables"- I'll grind them into a powder to add to the veggies we grew and dried to make our all-vegg powder (to sneak veggies into our diet).

Maybe we'll try to grow a few bunching onions indoor, now that we've brought in some tomato plants. A couple a week would be ok for fresh taste.

Vikki http://www.newviewgroupllc.com/ and http://newviewgroupllc.lefora.com/forum/category/all/page1/