Showing posts with label curing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label curing. Show all posts

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Harvesting Onions

Yesterday we had some very heavy rain, our local area got about 3-4 inches and our yard flooded. I went out to check my little garden plots today and most of my onions had been washed up after being under water yesterday. The roots were the only thing holding them in place. About 1/3 of the tops had fallen over as well, so today I have been trying to figure out what to do next. Do I harvest them, try to anchor them back in the soil or leave them as is?

Since onions are one of those plants that can be harvested at any time I decided I am going to go ahead and harvest the plants with the fallen stems over the next week, I anchored some of the onions whose tops had not fallen but the entire plant had been washed up, and I'm leaving the others. I'm taking a wait and see attitude right now. I only have about 30 onion plants right now and as often as I use onions I can easily go through these in a couple of weeks since they are relatively small bulbs (larger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball).

From what I've been reading, in Texas onions are harvested in May when 2/3 of the tops have fallen on the entire crop, where they are then pulled and laid in the sun to cure (outer layers dry to protect the inner layers), then the tops are cut off and they are stored or the tops can be braided and the onions hung until pulled off for use.

I feel that I've been fairly successful with the onions and I'd be comfortable planting them again in the future, so I think I'll plant many more in future years. It'll be a great money saver since I use them almost daily in my cooking. 

Here is my onion plot when I went to check on it today before I started playing around in it. I also have a yellow squash and zucchini planted in there two in the bare spots where onions didn't make it. When I tried stepping into the middle of the plot to help prop up a couple of the onions I ended up sinking down about 8 inches into the mud the soil is that soft right now.