Belated spring

It's late for the weather to just start to settle, and I've had the onion plants sitting in a box in a sink for the past week, but it's been either too wet or too cold (29 degrees the three nights before last night), which I wasn't sure the onions would survive.

But I planted 150 of them, plus about 25 tiny ones closely spaced for scallions. Much more manageable number than last year's 400+. I think the plants were smaller last year, so we got more to make up for the size.

The garlic is progressing nicely, including a row that's right were last year's crop grew. I must have missed a lot more of them during harvest than I'd realized. Fortunately, they're right on the edge of the bed, so I can plant the tomatoes and peppers around them.

I have shallot seeds, and I should plant them this week, but I've got too much on my agenda. They'll have to wait until Sunday or Monday.

Oh, and a few asparagus spears have popped up.

Onions planted

This year's plant count: 188. Planted about a week later than last year, partly because I've been busy and partly because the weather has been cold.

ETA: Apparently there was a crop failure for the shallots I was planning to try this year, so that part of my order got cancelled. So, no shallots this year. I think we'll be okay with 188 onions and what was it -- 60 or so garlic plants (not counting all the volunteer garlics).

Corn gluten meal

I read about using corn gluten meal to prevent weeds from sprouting between the onion plants, and it sounded like a perfect thing for me. It's organic, and it helps reduce the weeds that grow right up close to the onion plants, where it's almost impossible to use a hoe on them, without also pulling up the onions. I get so frustrated trying to weed them, because I can't bend or kneel well enough to get up close and personal with the weeds, so I'm stuck with whatever I can do with the hoe alone. I'm pretty good with a hoe, but there are limits to its use.

I couldn't find it locally last year, but I managed to find it this year. The manufacturer put a fancy name on the package, that had nothing to do with corn or gluten or  meal, but I found it in the small print, "ingredients: 100% corn gluten meal." Bingo!

The onion plants arrived Thursday (April 18), and I'm hoping to get them planted before the rains are due on Wednesday. Their arrival took me by surprise. The spring is so late in arriving that I thought I had a couple more weeks before onion planting time.

Add another $15 (approximately) to this year's expenses.

Something new, something blue

We're doing shallots this year, as something new. Shallots and red onions and Bright Lights chard -- ordered the bulbs, plants and seeds a couple weeks ago. Got the seeds already. Bulbs and plants in a few months. Total expense, a little under sixty bucks.

No sweet potatoes this year. The bunnies like the vines too much. We ended up with some tubers that looked like they'd already been sliced small enough for stir fry, like water chestnuts. No real substance to them. So, we'll try again sometime in the future when I've got the time and inclination to get serious about bunny exclusion.

Nothing blue. I lied about that.

Onions by the hundreds

We received and planted somewhere between 250 and 300 onions. Two-thirds of them red and a third of them yellow storage onions. I think the grower sent us extras, though, because we should have had 180 red and 60 yellow, and I'm pretty sure we have more than that. The birds are unplanting them in their search for breakfast, so we may end up with fewer than what we have now.

Asparagus is doing well. Ate several stalks with my neighbor a week ago, brought some to a friend at work a few days ago, and picked a whole bunch of them yesterday. At least some of the newly planted roots survived their first-year neglect and are coming back, albeit as scraggly little shoots, only visible if you know where to look.

Lettuces (green simpson and a red variety) and tatsoi are thriving on both my deck and my neighbor's. Hers are a bit further along, and I did some weeding and thinning yesterday. In the process, I got to eat the first lettuce of the season. Not exactly a whole salad. More like three one-inch-square leaves. But, hey, the first bites of the season are always the best.

I may be making rhubarb crisp tonight. I'd like to see if harvesting some branches now will, in fact, spur the plant into producing more branches than it would otherwise. I've already removed the flower stalks. I really want to make blueberry-rhubarb jam again this year, as soon as blueberries come into season.

Meanhile, I'm craving broccoli. I love broccoli, but mostly I love it raw. And I can't eat it raw any longer, because I have thyroiditis, and raw broccoli makes that problem worse. So I swore off broccoli. Until recently, when I decided that lightly cooked broccoli (which is okay for my thyroid) is better than no broccoli at all. I'm hoping to pick up the plants today and stick them in the ground today or tomorrow.

Basil seedlings have sprouted in duplicate. I thought I'd killed the first batch of seeds, and put the pots outdoors to be composted, but a week later (I tend to be slow about getting stuff out to the compost bin), there were sprouts in the pots. Both the outdoor pots and the follow-up pots indoors. So, lots of basil this year. Except I have no idea where to put it. I'm aiming to set new records for overly intensive planting this year.

Onions

I'm a writer, and whenever I go to workshops on storytelling, someone is bound to talk about peeling back the layers of an onion to get at the core of a character or a story. It makes me crazy every time they say it.

Admittedly, I'm metaphor-impaired, but I know my onions. And if you peel back all the layers of the onion -- there's nothing left!

The onions this year are, on average, a little smaller than last year. Or maybe it's just that there's a wider range of sizes, from substantial to puny.

There are a number of likely explanations. Last year was overwhelmingly rainy, including during the critical phase when the onions are storing up all their energy in the bulb. This year, the rain was good EXCEPT during that critical couple of weeks. Also, the onion bed this year has had less compost added to it than last year's bed, some of it is in a more shady spot, and we did a LOT less weeding this year. All together, it makes me marvel that we got any crop at all.

Behinder

There's a saying attributed to the Amish: "the faster I work, the behinder I get."

I haven't been working particularly fast, but I'm definitely getting behinder fast. We lost most of March and April to rains and floods, and we're still mired in what seems to be a perpetual rainy season. The garlic, which I thought might drown, seems to be thriving. The red onions -- all 200 or so of them -- were planted a few weeks ago. The peas have sprouted, and so have butternut squash from the compost pile. The asparagus is growing faster than we can eat it.

I just noticed yesterday that we have a few billion self-seeded dill plants. They've overflowed the whiskey barrel where we grew them last year, and have sprouted all around that barrel and in an adjoining one too.

I'm really late with the early crops and the indoor-seeded crops. I just started basil plants a couple days ago, and I still haven't started any lettuce. We had temperatures nearing 90 degrees the other day, which made me fear that I'd missed any conceivable window of opportunity for the cool-weather crops. I half expected the tatsoi to start bolting. Today, however, is barely into the 50s, if that, so if the thunderstorms ever stop, I'll get some lettuce seeds into the deck planters in the next couple days.

The lilacs have bloomed already, and the peonies are about to. The tree pollen is overwhelming.

Next week, we'll be getting nightshade-family plants from the local nursery. It's too early to plant the tomatoes and peppers, but I don't want to risk finding that the preferred varieties are sold out. I'm behinder enough without that happening!

Daffodils and onions

Signs that spring will, indeed, arrive eventually: the daffodils are coming up along the vegetable garden's fence, and I bought a bag of onions last week.

It pained me to have to buy onions. We had so many -- and such better quality -- but they did run out eventually. It's good to know that the red onions will, in fact, store until at least the end of February in my chilly kitchen. The last one was beginning to form a sprout in the interior of the onion (not visible outside), but was perfectly edible.

Onion update

I'd been wondering if the onions would grow after their initial bulbing.

At least with the rain we've been having, the answer is an emphatic "yes." We've been noticing how they seemed to growing substantially, but didn't have empirical data until today.

The first onion I picked ten days ago was about 3 1/2 ounces, and it was one of the biggest I could find at the time. I picked another one a few minutes ago, and while it was on the large side, it wasn't out of the ordinary. Weight: just under 7 ounces.

That means the fifty pounds of onions I'd previously calculated for our harvest has doubled to closer to one hundred pounds!

Resistance is futile

The onions have been taunting me for the last couple weeks, ever since they suddenly started to form bulbs.

Imagine 200 excited donkeys from the Shrek movies, all shouting, "Pick me! Pick me!" That's what I've been hearing and trying to resist.

I haven't grown onions often enough to know whether they've maxed out already, with the remaining time in the ground only required for curing purposes, or if they'll actually continue to get bigger until the tops fall over.

In any event, I couldn't stand the temptation any longer, and picked a couple. The first one weighed 3.7 ounces, and the second was slightly larger, around 4 ounces. We have something in the vicinity of 150 onions this size, plus another 50 small ones (ranging from an ounce to perhaps 2 1/2 ounces) for a total of at least 50 pounds.

In the grocery store today, red onions are selling for 99 cents a pound, so our crop would cost us $50+ to purchase fully grown, and the seedlings cost us a little under $30. Not a huge return on investment financially, but factoring in the better flavor of these onions, it's a worthwhile crop.

Sun (a little)

While I wasn't looking (because the rain kept me indoors), the garden grew.

In no particular order, today I found a 2" banana pepper that's already set (while many more pepper plants are flowering, both bananas and Ace); yellow squash on the verge of blooming; and grape tomatoes that have set. The swiss chard is starting to look good too, while the basil is struggling in the cool dampness.

For a while, the onions were threatening to be very large scallions. It's more than time for them to have started bulbing, and as of a few days ago, they looked like leeks (except they were red). We'd have found a use for them anyway, but I was pleased to notice a definite trend toward globe-shaped root tops. I still think they're going to be late, but they could turn out hugely magnificent with all this rain.

We've harvested about a quart of sugarsnap peas so far, most of them eaten before they leave the garden. Many of the pods are extra-long and empty of peas, though, more like snow pea pods. I'm attributing it to the rain, which may be causing the pods to grow too quickly, sort of the same way sudden, excessive rain leads to cracking tomatoes.

Pollen and showers and moles, oh my

A few days of rain, followed by unseasonably warm weather, have produced a blanket of pollen. The wasps are happy; me and my allergy-stuffed head, not so much.

The onions have been re-planted several times. Seems we've got some kind of critter rummaging around in the onion bed. Each time, several plants are unearthed, but not eaten or otherwise harmed, which is why I suspect it's birds going after earthworms, rather than evil woodchucks.

On the other hand, it could be the moles. We've got a family of them, right smack dab in the middle of the garden. They don't seem to realize that they're virtually on the surface, instead of several inches underground where they're supposed to live. They're underneath a large piece of thick black plastic (50 times the thickness of landscape fabric). When I picked up the plastic, it's like peeling back the top layer of dirt, or like looking at an ant farm, with a maze of little paths leading to and from the nest.

Two hundred onions

That's how many we planted on Saturday.

I'm not sure how many bushels of onions that will be, toward the hundreds of bushels of vegetables we eat in a year. Instead, I figured, for two households for an entire year, it's 100 apiece, or 2 a week.

Which reminded me of a footnote in Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, about the group's cook, who promises to make something delicious for the troop, because she has half an onion left over from their previous, delicious meal: "A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish or the woman."

I hope to have more than half an onion left over, come late summer.

Tally-hoe

The previous tally of expenses was $115.65.

A few more expenses:

• carrot seeds $ 1.05
• manure 11.54

Total now is $128.24

Also: The onions are here! They arrived on the 16th.

Impatience

I want the onion plants NOW.

They should arrive in the next week or so. Last year, we planted them on April 18th, and I believe we received them a day or two before that.