71. Lifting Onions

A lot of kitchen garden pests don’t like the strong smell of the allium family, so I plant them as a deterrent between each row of vegetables in the raised beds. I use all the varieties: white and red onions, leeks, shallots and spring onions. It is a system that seems to protect most crops relatively well but is not so successful with the salads and brassicas. And at the end of the season I have a glut of onions.

One of the final jobs of autumn is to lift the onions and store them. They are ready when the leaves die back and the head of the bulbs pops out of the ground. You dig them out and shake off as much of the soil as you can before laying them on their sides. In hot climates you can leave them lying out in the beds - it will take a couple of weeks in sunshine for the skins to dry out enough to store safely, turning them by a quarter every couple of days to dry them evenly. Once they have dried out they are ready to hang/store in the kitchen, and will keep for 3-4 months.

The English late autumn weather doesn’t produce enough sunshine for this and I don’t have a greenhouse, so I will have to do it differently. Plastic bakery baskets with their perforated bottoms and sides are ideal for drying them out. They stack easily and allow air to circulate around the onions freely. It is important not to wash them before you do this. I lay the onions on their side, not touching and then stack the baskets in layers on the freezer in the sunniest part of my garage. The smell of onions when I go into the garage to turn them is overpowering.

Having a steady supply of onions over the winter will be great - we use them a lot in cooking. And there are enough to share with the neighbours. Next year I may consider growing the more yellow-coloured Japanese onions over winter to have a crop ready in the spring, when this supply runs out.