Our storage onions began their lives as seedlings in the middle of February, hit the garden in April, and were finally harvested this week.  I actually would have liked to leave them in the ground a bit longer until the tops completely died back, but it's so wet some of the bulbs were starting to rot.  (You know the weather is damp when you hang your laundry on the line Monday, take it in halfway-dry to drape inside when it starts to rain that afternoon, and then find mold growing on your still-damp clothes Wednesday morning.)

A bit of rot aside, the onions look great this year, although I suspect there won't be enough of them (again).  I've actually been harvesting onions out of the garden for the last month to cook with, so I guess the harvest was really bigger than it seems from this photo.

I spread our haul out to dry on the front porch instead of on the drying racks partly from laziness, but also because I want to be able to pick through the onions as they dry and use up problematic bulbs immediately.  Mark's mom has given us a screen rack I'm looking forward to trying out with the onions...once the ATV is back in working order and we can haul it in.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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