Things I am Learning from Growing Onions
Have you ever grown onions in your garden? Earlier this year, I planted onion sets and I started dreaming about breakfast bowls and fajitas with homegrown onions. Over the past few weeks, we have been enjoying fresh onions with our meals but I am also excited to bag up the onions and get them ready for winter. Here are a few things I have learned from growing onions.
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Things I Learned from Growing Onions
One of the hardest parts of growing onions is knowing when they are ready to harvest. Most people agree that you should wait to pull them out of the ground till the green leaves have fallen over and started to turn brown. But I will admit that I found it hard to wait. I pulled a few early on and enjoyed them with supper even though they were pretty small.
Even though this is the third year to have a garden in this spot, we have a lot of rocks in our garden. No matter how much we till up the ground, we just keep finding more rocks. Our onions are a little smaller than we expected but they are full of flavor.
A few weeks ago we decided it was time to harvest the onions and start curing them for storage.
One of the keys to long-term storage for onions is making sure they are fully dried before you bag them up. We repurposed my unheated, plastic greenhouse so I could cure them for winter. I laid them out on the shelves with the greenhouse cover well-vented and let them dry.
After several weeks of curing in the greenhouse, they were ready to trim off the loose brown leaves and get them ready for storage. You will know they are ready when the onions have papery skin that starts to flake off.
I ordered some mesh produce bags so I wase set to split up the onions and get them ready for winter storage.
I put up a couple of nails under the basement stairs and hung up by onion bags with plenty of space between each bag. I’ve read that these will store all through the winter when stored in a cool, dark place with plenty of air circulation so I’m excited to see how long these last!
Have you ever grown onions? Got any tips for enjoying them all winter? I’d love to hear!
