Planting Onions

The 2011 garden season has officially started here at the Coleman household. Before I get into the garden itself, I'd like to say a little bit about one of my favorite resources. It's this book:

Following the guidelines in this book, I've learned to steer clear of the traditional method of gardening, the one that my grandparents used: row, path, row, path, row, path. The traditional method dedicated 50% of the space to walking, and that walking in between the rows of vegetables compacts the soil around the roots. A better way is to plant the vegetables in wide rows (beds) that you can reach into from at least one side so that you never have to step into it, compacting the soil. Even better: last year David worked very hard helping me to build raised beds throughout the garden. This provides better drainage and also saves stress and strain on my back.

Now on to what I did this week:
These are onion starts that I purchased from Dixondale Farms. I purchased a sample set of "intermediate day" onions. (According to their website I could grow either intermediate day or short day onions, but it looks like we are more in the intermediate day area.) The sample set consists of a white onion ("Super Star"), a yellow onion ("Candy") , and a red onion ("Red Candy Apple"). I planted 20 of each variety and passed on the extras to my neighbor for her garden. I followed the planting instructions provided by Dixondale. One thing that I didn't notice while I was preparing the soil 2 days ago but certainly did notice while I was planting the seedlings is that the ones near the edge of the bed went into damp, cool soil. That first 3-4 inches of soil doesn't get any sun yet and was noticeably cooler than the rest of the soil in the bed. The seedlings that were planted on the other side of the trench went into soil that was much warmer and drier. The tops of all of the onions are in the sun but it'll be interesting to see if there are any growing differences since the roots of half of them are in much cooler soil.

I set the onions off to one side because I plan to plant some carrots along beside them. They will develop a very nice relationship side-by-side.

This is what my garlic bed looks like today.

These are cabbage plants getting along nicely with cilantro. Sorry about the lighting. The fence casts a mean shadow.



These peas I planted last fall, in September. I've been harvesting peas from them all winter. Come spring, these will still be popping out peas left and right. What a nice head start!



This is a little artichoke starting to form on one of our artichoke plants. Peek-a-boo!