Onions

Yesterday I transplanted the rest of the lettuce and all of the arugula into larger pots.  The arugula was doing poorly under my lack of supervision.  It's just been so warm this year that I haven't been spending enough time in the basement with the plants - they would have been transplanted long before now had it been any other year.  Last year was so cold and snowy that I was desperate to be in the company of growing things.  Indeed, this time last year I had already started the onions.

I have tried two years in a row now to grow onions from seed.  This should be do-able.  In fact, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward Smith gives quite a nice little set of instructions.  But for me, no cigar.  First, I have a hard time starting the seeds, many just don't come up.  Of the ones that do sprout, many quickly die off.  Finally, the ones that remain and I transplant into the garden have never developed in size to be bigger than a golf ball.  Last year I started over 60 onions, and harvested about 6.

Look in the foreground in this picture and you can see one of my baby onions.  This was from last summer - I was making cole slaw.

This year I will purchase onion sets.  I'm hoping to be as self-sufficient in onions as I am garlic, so I want to look for long-storing onions.  I found an inexpensive sampler set from Burpee that includes Walla Walla, Spanish White and Red Zeppelin, but the only storage onion is the Red Zeppelin.  I might just go ahead and get that, after all, it's all a big experiment.