Onion Harvest

A beautiful fall day it is here today so I took advantage of it and gathered all our drying onions, carried them out to the front deck in the sunshine for final sorting in preparation for storage.

All of the onions were grown in two 4' x 8' raised beds and I haven't bought a single onion since early spring when I started pulling our young onions as scallions. So even though I now know how many pounds I have to store for winter use, I'd be curious to know how many pounds I've already used over the summer months. No way to tell; that would have been a tad labor intensive to keep track of, but I can say that we use A LOT of onions regularly. (I even saute a few onions to add to our scrambled eggs in the morning . . . a little dismaying, perhaps, to guests who haven't been forewarned, but hey, doesn't everybody know how good onions are for you?)

At least one-third (maybe a smidge more) of one bed was planted out to red onions.

Although the reds are on the smallish side, I was tickled to get even this harvest of 8 pounds 4 ounces because I've never had much luck getting them to grow for me before. And I do love red onions. They add so much color to foods and have their own unique flavor. I'm guesstimating I would have had about 4-5 pounds more to harvest and store if I hadn't stolen so many before they reached maturity. Great job, red onions, you done good!

So one entire raised bed and perhaps two-thirds of another were given over to the old mainstays, the yellow onions. As with the red ones, I hit the yellow ones pretty hard during the summer for a lot of cooking. Total weight for them today? 46 pounds 6 ounces. Not too shabby, huh?

All bagged and ready for storage. If these keep as well as the ones did from last year, you'll not hear any complaints from this here gardener. Assuming they do, we should have enough onions to take us all the way through the coming winter and early spring.

Whew! One more garden-type job I can cross of the list.