Onion Harvest

It has been a long time since the onions seeds first went in to the dirt this year.  I think I may have planted them shortly after the first of January in flats under grow lights.  The first couple of months they grew very slowly from tiny green threads emerging from the soil to the tiny young seedlings I planted outside sometime in early April.  All summer the seedlings grew and finally the plants started to bulb up in the past few months.  In the last couple of weeks the tops have begun to fall over and once most of the bed had fallen, I decided it was finally time to harvest.  I had to wait for a sunny day of course so they could cure properly in the sun.  Today was that day.

 

I am allowing the onions to cure in the very bed that I harvested them from.  This is definitely the bulk of the harvest for us, though there are more onions bordering the brassica bed.  Those border onions were left over sets that I had from planting the bed and they were planted a couple weeks later, so they are not quite ready for harvest yet.

 

After these onions spend a couple of days in the sun they will be transferred to the back room where they can complete their curing in the more controlled climate of the house.  The largest onions will be braided for storage while the top-less and thick necked onions will be set aside to be used up first since they aren't as likely to keep well.  The grand total of actual onions from this bed is 264 and that doesn't count all the small ones that were picked for fresh eating before now.  Of course I don't expect all of them to keep for the long term, so I will be dehydrating as many of the thick necked or small onions as I can in the next few weeks.

 

Here they are drying on the very same shelves they sprouted on.  Hows that for completing the cycle?