Planted onions and shallots this week. We love onions, and by ‘we’ I mean Steve and I. The kids are not quite sure about them and tho I put them in tons of recipes I usually dice them as tiny as possible so no one will notice. Lately I’ve been substituting shallots for onions in most recipes because they get more tender after cooking and therefore more easily disguise-able (is that even a word? :) Part of being a good parent is learning the fine art of subterfuge.
Years ago when we first switched over to organic milk, the kids were unsure of how this alien milk would taste and hesitant to drink it. So for about a month I poured organic milk into a couple of normal milk cartons that I had saved. After a month of drinking it without noticing, we told them they had been drinking the organic stuff and all was well from then on (neener neener). I also used to put tofu in quite a few dishes without informing the young ‘uns. I distinctly remember the evening Wilson found out he had been eating it in my enchiladas….. said he thought it was cheese. Months later, after finding a tiny piece of soy in the eggrolls, he asked me if I had put mushrooms in them. When I told him that it was tofu, he was relieved. Maybe our kids just need to learn to eat with blindfolds on.
But I digress. Onions, shallots, and garlic. These antagnonists of peas and children everywhere went into the ground this week for our winter garden. I have grown onions only 2 other times so I am still a novice….still plenty of mistakes to be made. I got my sets by mail order - Comred onions, Dutch Yellow and French Red shallots, and California hard and soft-necked garlic. No pics of the garlic, they went in the ground last week and I forgot to take photos.
Here is the onion bed….inter-planted with 4 broccoli plants and surrounded by mixed greens and an unfinished concrete pathway (long boring story)
The onions were about an inch in diameter and we planted them about 6 inches apart and an inch deep.
The shallots were considerably bigger (not withstanding the little guy in the pic)…
but the instructions said to plant just deep enuf to cover the crown…so that’s what we did.
but the instructions said to plant just deep enuf to cover the crown…so that’s what we did.
They are also planted next to broccoli and their archenemy, the pea, is probably 3 ft. away….we’ll see how that goes.
Good onion info can be found on these links…
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