Gardening: Vegetable Excuses and Shady Onions

Onions.

I want onions in my garden.

This would seem to be a perfectly reasonable goal for someone with a vegetable garden, if it weren't for the lack of sun mentioned in my previous post. I've tried, two years in a row, to grow shallots - really, potato onions - without success. The sensible thing would be to give up on growing my own onions and buy them from the grocery.

The problem is that groceries peel the papery skin off of onions, and as a result the onions go bad, quickly and unpredictably. I don't know why they do this. It's not as if they have the produce folks peeling potatoes or bananas or apples and putting them in stacks to rot and attract fruit flies. They add wax or even plastic to cucumbers, in spite of the cucumber's nice protective skin. But they're apparently under the illusion that the average grocery customer lives in terror of papery outer onion skin.

I've seen onions that appear to be the victims of frantic personnel _clawing_ off the last bit of loose skin that could possibly be separated from the bulb. I've seen gouges. I've seen almost entirely unprotected white or yellow union flesh. I've seen onions so naked that they attract fruit flies. Why, oh, why, can you tell me why they do this?!

Ahem. Anyway. Whatever the nefarious reason, the result is that onions from the grocery far, far too frequently turn up moldy when cut open. I'm tired of unreliable onions, so I want to grow my own - if not for all of my onion needs, at least for backup. What I grow doesn't have to be onion bulbs, it just has to taste of onion.

There are chives, of course - those are already growing. But they're a little too mellow and well-behaved for general onion purposes.

The Idiot Gardener tells me that leeks can grow in cool shade, so that's the first strategy.

And that makes me think of the mythical (to me) perennial bunching onion, an onion that's supposed to grow in stalks like scallions, bunching together and reproducing like chives. I've never successfully grown these, but that may be because I started the tiny seedlings in the same shady place where I planned to grow the onions on. If I instead start a patch in blazing sunlight (perhaps in a pot) maybe nice stocky divisions from a season or two later would consent to grow in less sun? It's worth a try.

The third strategy is onion sets grown to scallions. I've always vaguely disapproved of onion sets - such a big "seed" for such a small onion. But I find myself wondering if a set will consent to produce a decent scallion with limited sunlight, like a tulip is almost guaranteed to produce a flower the first year? And could I store a supply of sets in the fridge and plant a fresh handful every week or so, to keep the onions moving? If so, that could be a fine plan.

The last strategy is Egyptian walking onions. These are the onions that first put out normal green onion  stalks, then produce little bitty onions on top of the stalks, as if the onion failed to pay attention in onion class. These aerial onions, I'm told, can then be planted as if they were onion sets, and will produce scallions. So perhaps I could keep a small patch of walking onions in a sunny spot, producing enough sets to make scallions in the partial shade? I suspect that the answer is, no, I can't, but it's also worth a try.

Meanwhile, I will continue to complain about nude onions, and grocery personnel will continue to give me that good-natured confused look when I do so.

Image: By Hedwig Storch. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Leaves and Sun Denial

There's an area toward the back and side of the house that we've designated the vegetable garden. It's convenient to the back door, nestled into the fence, with a nice newish crazypaved path. We even added a light to enable evening herb-snipping. There's just one problem: It doesn't get full sun. Vegetables are supposed to have full sun. I know this. I believe this. But I continue to try to grow edibles in this space. They don't all fail - raspberries and herbs grow there, we had a couple of decent crops of snap beans, and rainbow chard put out a few leaves. And the shade is deciduous, so there will be a lot more sun from late fall to early spring.

So I thought, greens. Cold-weather greens while it's cold and sunny, and lettuce and other heat-sensitive greens while it's hot and shaded. This could give me a chance to use some of the information in various garden books that make me hungry. Joy Larkcom's The Salad Garden, for example, and her even more interesting Oriental Vegetables. And The Harrowsmith Salad Garden, by Turid Forsyth and Marilyn Simonds Mohr, always makes me feel as if I'm already tasting garlic and vineger and olive oil. And Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping books - I have a battered old original, I believe from before they were broken up into many smaller books, and the pictures of the French and German gardens in particular always make me want to plant something.

The problem is that even greens tend to fail for me, a fact that I find inexplicable given the success of the bush beans, which I could have sworn were more sun-demanding than lettuce. So I plan to take a proper geek experimental approach, choosing several, or maybe more like a dozen, different leafy plants and planting examples of each in all of the different sunny or shady areas of the vegetable garden, plus perhaps a few more spots around the yard. I'll plant them at an inappropriately close spacing, because the goal of this experiment is to see if the plants thrive at all - if a plant crowds out of its four-inch spacing, it's already doing better than the average lettuce plant that I put in.

So. That's the plan. There will be updates.

Image: By Forest & Kim Starr. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Very Funny

"Cool, damp fall," I said.

They're predicting temperatures of up to 95.

Hmph.

Image: By Brian Snelson. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Fall

In less than two weeks, we've shifted from sticky summer to cool, damp fall. Not "countdown to freeze" fall, but harvest fall - the plants are still thriving, but without that desperate grab-some-water-and-growgrowgrow! air that they had just week before last. They seem, well, relaxed.

The rose next to the neighbor's garage is blooming - I can't remember if I've ever seen its flowers, but they're lovely double white things with an unsweet, peppery scent. Sir Thomas Lipton, over by the shed, is producing disease-free flowers for the first time in years. L. D. Braithwaite is producing big, slowly opening, relaxed red roses. Sally Holmes still has that frantic air, but she always did have more work ethic than is really good for her.

And the Japanese anemones are blooming everywhere. Oh, and the hydrangeas. And the butterfly bush. And the unnamed hybrid tea.

I usually declare that May is my favorite garden time, but maybe late September is winning me over.

Image: Mine.

Gardening: Winter vegetables

Autumn may have arrived. Or it may, as I said elseblog, be another of this year's funny weather jokes. But right now the garden is cooler and wetter, and my mind is turning to winter vegetables.

But I failed to plan ahead. I'm dismayed to find that it's already too late for peas, at least according to the local gardening guide. And from experience, it's too late for lettuce from seeds. And I didn't order the gray French shallots that I kept talking about - though it may not be quite too late. And the main vegetable plot doesn't get as much sun as a vegetable plot should, so there's really no space appropriate for any other onions - Himself is OK with shallots in the sunnier flowerbeds, but dubious about any other vegetables.

So for the vegetable patch, I think I'm down to fava beans, or lettuce from already-stocky seedlings. I like the idea of lettuce, so that may be the plan.

Unfortunately, it's usually only the idea of lettuce that works for me. Dense stands of ruffly or rumpled green and red leaves. Memories of the rampion in the fairy tale. Thoughts of crushed garlic and vinegar and really good olive oil. Little minced scallions - will scallions grow from onion sets even in not enough sun? Hm.

It all sounds good, but the reality is generally that the lettuce grows and bolts without ever seeing a salad bowl. I may try it all the same.
Image: By Buen Gastronomico. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Flowers I wish I'd planted

This is the time of chrysanthemums and dahlias - big, bright, crazy flowers. I have no chrysanthemums, and my dahlias are languishing from lack of space and plushy conditions. So there are no crazy flowers. Right now, that makes me (slightly) sad.

In the spring, I briefly consider the fact that I'll want these flowers when fall comes. I eye the blank spaces in the garden or, more likely, the blank spaces that I could create by evicting something else. But in the spring, the roses and Oriental poppies and lilacs and irises are budding, and I'm certainly not going to evict any of them. And any existing blank spaces could be used for beans or tomatoes or nice stocky annual flower seedlings - things that will pay off sooner than chrysanthemums or dahlias. So the moment passes.

It's not as if the garden has no flowers right now. The Japanese anemones are in their prime, and they're my very favorite flower. And the roses aren't done yet. And our wisteria is still blooming, as it does all summer every summer. I don't know if it's sterile, or if there's no pollinating plant nearby, but I'm pleased either way.

But I like the crazy. I want Alice in Wonderland flowers, and right now I have none. Logically, now, when I'm feeling the lack, should be the time to motivate myself to clear out something else (driveway, Free sign - it'll get a good home) and plant some crazy-flowered hardy perennial chrysanthemum. But I fear that next September I'll be posting these same sentiments all over again.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Enabling the nonsense

OK, this is an old mystery, but, hey, it remains unsolved.

I can write about perfume. Incessantly. Without worrying about whether I make any sense, or have any expertise to offer; I just ramble happily. So the other blog goes rolling along, with many silly posts and cat pictures and the occasional coherent observation.

I can't seem to write about gardening - or, for that matter, chocolate or bacon or fried chicken or murder mysteries or any of the other topics that are on topic for this blog - in the same way.

Why is that?  It might, of course, just be practice. Maybe I need to write a few hundred gardening posts before I'm entirely comfortable writing nonsense about gardening.  And, yes, I think that  comfortably writing nonsense about gardening is a worthwhile goal at this point, because I have to be comfortable with the nonsense to have any hope of writing sense. I discussed that recently... in the other blog. In fact, come to think of it, the other blog also got the latest bacon and fried chicken post! That's not fair! This is the saturated fat blog!

Ahem. Anyway. The goal is to write just as much nonsense here, as I do there. So there.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.