At work we had leftover slightly-sprouted red, white, and yellow pearl onions from an experiment about root tip mitosis. Not one to waste sprouted plants, I took them home and tucked them into the earth wherever I could find space in between ornamental bushes. 18 made it into a pot, and the other 72 are in the ground. Yeah, so maybe I got a little over-enthusiastic. But hey, they say that onions and garlic keep insects away, and as you can see from the week's
earlier posts, I can use all the help I can get!
After 3 days, pearl onions reach toward the sun
Upon hearing that I had managed to plant 90 onions in the garden without taking up any prime planting real estate, my mother said, "You crack me up. Sure do take after your grandpa." I take that as a huge compliment... my grandfather is one part farmer, one part deep-sea fisherman, one part stubbornly self-sufficient, and 3 parts awesome. Well, awesome except for that one time he fed me okra that he'd grown and pickled... eeeew, the dill-soaked slime! Reminds me of, well,
slugs.
2 comments:
onions! we can never get enough of them for cooking! i hadn't thought to grow our own garlic and onions until now. i also hadn't heard that they help keep the insects away. if you don't use them all, do you know if they'll come back the next year?
I don't know! I would assume that they'd come back... either through re-seeding themselves or by the bulb living on. But this is my first time doing it, so we'll see... maybe I'll have to leave one or two in the ground. :)
I have heard that you're supposed to separate out the garlic cloves though... if you plant a whole bulb or let a plant go through another year's cycle, you'll end up with each clove trying to make a bulb and the result will be that the cloves are too tiny to really use.
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