Harvesting the onions

 

It's now that time of year when all the allotment holders are harvesting onions. As we walk along the lane to the allotment we can see onions strung up in greenhouses, laid out along benches or left lying on top of the beds. They are everywhere.

I spent an afternoon last week harvesting my onions. The tops had started to bend over so I knew they were ready to be pulled up. Not only that, I could see that they had grown amazingly in the last couple of weeks. Then came the annual problem of where to put them to dry out. The first lot went on top of the brassica net frame, another lot went on an old growhouse frame which Richard dragged out of storage.

A couple of days later when the roots had dried out I moved them all to the cold frame which is not being used for seedlings at the moment.  There is no room in the greenhouses to store them and not much space in the shed either.  They will be fine in the cold frame until they have dried out completely and I can clean them up and put into onion bags.

With the onion bed cleared and weeded I made use of the space to plant some lettuce seedlings and sow some more radish and beetroot.

Richard has been doing some work on the fence down one side of the plot recently. Our neighbour on the other side does not look after his plot and the weeds get out of hand. There are some really bad weeds growing there--nettles, Himalayan Balsam, bindweed, hogweed to name just a few. So Richard has put some black weed suppressant membrane along one section of the fence and a length of bamboo fencing along another. These are just materials which we had to hand. They will not stop weeds from growing under  the fence into our plot, but they will help to stop them growing through and will hide the ugly view we have of a very neglected plot.