I think I overdid it in the heat a bit today.  I wouldn’t usually work out in the hottest part of a hot day, but several sources told me that severe thunderstorms were on the way for the afternoon.  And I so wanted to get the last of the onions in!  It was a perfect moment for harvesting - after some dry days without much rain on them, a very hot dry sunny day.  Onions have to be cured (dried) carefully in order to last into the winter months.  I’m not planning to buy any onions, so I’m pretty invested in curing ours carefully.  Rain on them in the afternoon would have seriously interfered.   So I went and pulled the rest of the onions, laid them out in the sun to dry, and then didn’t stop there, because there was so much else to do, clearing beds, weeding, harvesting…  It’s amazing how fast you can overheat - working fast so you can be done sooner, feeling the sun on your skin and the sweat dripping everywhere feels kindof good, if you keep moving, keep distracted.  Before I knew it, I was pretty tired, headache starting up, face beet red, vague nausea.  It’s taken several hours of fluids and cooling down again to start to feel better.  And then it never did rain - blue sky all day.

But this post is supposed to be about onions.  Onions are one one of those magical things to grow, to me.  When the bulbs start to fatten up, and you can store them and use them months later, it just seems amazing, when I think of them coming from tiny little seeds, and the most impossibly thin frail little stems.  I grow all my onions from seed now, after years of disappointment with the little bulb onion sets.  I never got decent onions from those, and many of them went to seed and made no bulbs at all.  It made a lot more sense after I learned about what impacts onions’ growth in one of my favorite gardening books - The Book of Garden Secrets, by Dorothy Patent and Diane Bilderback.  When you buy the bulbs, you don’t have any idea how they’ve been stored, and it turns out that exposure to certain amounts of light and temperatures will influence whether the onions that grow from the bulbs go to seed, or produce a food onion.  I can be more sure of what happens to them when I grow them myself, and that has resulted in astronomically better onion success.

We grew 3 varieties this year:  Copra, Redwing, and Varsity.  Redwing did beautifully last year when Copra failed; this year is vice-versa.  Varsity is new to me, and I’m very happy with it - huge perfectly round yellow onions that are gorgeous.  The final test will be to see how they store.

To cure onions well for storage, you are supposed to wait until their tops fall over, and stop watering them at this point.  (This is where the unpredictability of rain comes in.)  When they have been in the ground under these conditions for 10 days or so, you pull them, hopefully on a hot dry sunny day.  Lay them out on the ground in the sun to dry, but only for a day or two.  Next, they are brought indoors and laid out on a screen for finishing drying.  When their stems have no wetness left at all, I braid them into onion ropes and hang them for storage.  And that is our onion supply for the year! If we are lucky, they may last into early March, when the first chives and green onions come in, and the cycle starts again.