O/t:- ncm

[tarquinbeech]

Wow....I am being serious, but I literally live off onions...not just the onions but the whole plant, seed heads included.

When I first started it was a horrible disaster but now I eat onions, plus the "leaves" plus the seed-laden scapes every day....I save all the seeds and when I am down to my last 50 onion sets, I start re-planting.....life is actually quite simple and onions are invincible if you plant them at the right time.

[tarquinbeech]

.......... I propose a gardening thread, not least because me and tarquin could become mates. I sowed some giant onion seeds on January 1st (apparently it's tradition) and 21 of the 25 germinated. I don't know what I did wrong, but only 7 have survived to form a second leaf, and they are on regular watch. I've got another two varieties as back up that are going well, albeit a couple of months behind the big boys. One of my remaining ambitions in life is to grow a 3lb onion, because for me the journey from a seed the size of a grain of sugar to a huge onion is fascinating to follow. I have managed 2lb 12oz specimens on a couple of occasions, but the yearned for prize one still eludes me.

ps if this doesn't meet the "pretty pointless threads" criteria you asked for, I don't know what does.

There is nothing pointless about growing your own food......when the "end-times" come, the riff-raff will be falling over themselves to steal your onions.....I feel an onion video coming up......Growing, saving seeds, cooking.....it took me a few years, but they are now my biggest crop.

[queenslandpie]

There is nothing pointless about growing your own food......when the "end-times" come, the riff-raff will be falling over themselves to steal your onions.....I feel an onion video coming up......Growing, saving seeds, cooking.....it took me a few years, but they are now my biggest crop.

What climate do you grow them in and tips for warm weather growing?

[i961pie]

Never have liked bleddy gardening, looks like I'm going to have to concentrate on finding a hobby for Saturdays! Bollox!

I have a very large allotment and 3 greenhouses so it's about time I went and did some weeding and rotavating ready for the planting season. Also I have 6 old baths which are great for the likes of growing carrots, lettuce and strawberries etc. They keep away the carrot fly and rabbits and are easy to cover.

[sidders]

I think the best way of filling NCM in the coming months (yes. it will be more than weeks) is to provide what our lives may be lacking - humour. Let's have a 'great jokes I remember' fred.
The earliest joke I can remember (I must have been about 7 or 8) was 'What's the Queen's favourite record? ANSWER: Magic Moments on Phillips 10-inch.

[ancientpie]

How about a thread on river fishing?

[Wedgie_pie]

How about a thread on river fishing?

Great idea ancient, I could do with a nap this afternoon...

[Elite_Pie]

Wow....I am being serious, but I literally live off onions...not just the onions but the whole plant, seed heads included.

When I first started it was a horrible disaster but now I eat onions, plus the "leaves" plus the seed-laden scapes every day....I save all the seeds and when I am down to my last 50 onion sets, I start re-planting.....life is actually quite simple and onions are invincible if you plant them at the right time.

This is my best effort from 2015, weighing in at 2lb 11.25oz, or in metric 1.226 Kg:



It was a variety called Kelsae Giant, and is well known for producing show onions. I've also got some Ailsa Craig seeds growing, and a new variety for me called Bedfordshire Champion. Onions are cheap to buy in the shops, but I find watching them grow fascinating.

[tarquinbeech]

What climate do you grow them in and tips for warm weather growing?

Average temps here in Northern Mexico are 30+ Celsius from Feb to October but cool at nights because I am a mile above sea level, 3 or 4 days of frost (minus 2 or 3 is the worst it gets) usually one or two nights around Xmas and early Jan, day temps in Nov, Dec and Jan are still around 20 degrees Celsius.

There is no proper soil here and no big box stores where I can buy any....I had to get the bus 2 hours 20 minutes south to the state capital to even buy a lawnmower and strimmer for my 10 acres....then I "discovered" goats and sheep which I saved from the slaughter market and I still have the original 2 females I started with and I get 8 or 9 new babies every year, from 6 females........ I grow the babies on for 8 months or so and they go to market in June or July.

The animals "free range" during the day and I have pulled about a 1,000 metres of 6 foot fencing myself, topped with barbed wire, secured every 2 metres with metal fence posts.....it keeps the animals in but unfortunately my neighbours cut the fences to steal anything they can find, even occasionally the animals......I've had 4 massive holes cut in the fences this month alone.

The point of detailing the animals, is that I now have half-decent soil after 5 years of collecting their droppings.....12 animals create a lot of free manure if you "force" them to continue to return to a compound near the house because that is the only place I put their water buckets.....1 day in the sun completely dries the droppings and I can sweep them up into a couple of 20 litre buckets and make liquid fertilizer by soaking them overnight in a 55 gallon drum (the floaters go into an old liquidiser)......then I saved 10 old metal baths from my 16 bedrooms and built 5 concrete-block raised beds (steel-reinforced foundations) 4 metres by 2 metres, 2 blocks high....old dead trees that I collect in my truck, in the base, then palm tree fronds (I have thousands) then garbage soil from the foundation and topped off with manure mixed with any topsoil I scrounge from the fields (50 wheel-barrow loads at least)....it has taken a long time but now I eat most days from the garden.

Onions.....no point in planting out in the height of summer as 40 to 45 degrees in the sun kills the young onions, so I shade cloth over the metal baths, fill one whole bath with last years saved seeds, 2 to 3 handfuls of un-hulled seed pods containing 2 seeds per hull scattered over the bath, lightly raked in and a minimal covering of home-made compost (animal droppings, cardboard, old rotted clothes, weeds, minimal grass clippings) and a good watering.
Within a month you should have 150 to 200 young onion seedlings all bunched together (normally in twos) that you can start to plant out in batches of 20 per week from September onwards (cut a small 6 inch square of seedlings from the bath topsoil, like you see guys do when they are laying turf?....and carry them on your shovel to the raised beds).....I usually pick a different area every week, 4 small rows of 5 onions spread 1 clenched fist apart, biggest onion seedlings in the back row, then medium, then the tiddlers at the front (more light at the front plus I can liquid fertilise the tiddlers with urine)
Despite all the above, the excess heat tends to make the onions bolt before they reach full maturity (send up a pointy central seed-head) so you need to be constantly pulling those immature onions first and constantly adding them everything chopped, bulbs plus greens plus seed-heads, to beans or rice or pretty much all meals (I guess I could do a huge batch, blanched and frozen but I like to cook fresh every day).......be careful with the central spear (seed scape), if it gets too big and starts to "bulge" it literally turns to a woody "stick" so you need to leave those for seed-saving....I "trial and error" a few as I'm pulling them, a quick nibble to check if it's edible so discard those scapes (you can still eat the outer "leaves" and most of the onion bulb) or leave them for next year's seeds.
Basically it's practise, after your first 200 onions you know which ones to eat whole, which ones to discard the central "spike" and which ones to leave for seeds (you get about 50 to 100 double-seeds per fully-flowered onion....the bees love them, so 10 seed heads, fully flowered and brown-n-crispy in the sun is easily sufficient for next year)

Summary - grow a huge batch in the shade, literally invincible once they have 2 leaves, plant out in batches every week or fortnight in small grids, plant out in full sun when it's cooler, late September through till early April, pointless planting out in the height of summer, May through August as you will lose more than you will grow....concentrate on peppers, tomatoes, squash and sweet potatoes in the summer.

Raised bed video with my first failed batch of onions which I planted out too late......I replanted batches from Sept-Oct onwards and now I have onions literally everywhere (need a new video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E8OuvEX7M4
Look at the amount of manure on the floor in this vid from last year, a stiff broom and a shovel for 10 minutes makes a decent batch of plant food......now the onions, carrots, peas etc are going crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3S-NrQlxtc

[tarquinbeech]

This is my best effort from 2015, weighing in at 2lb 11.25oz, or in metric 1.226 Kg:



It was a variety called Kelsae Giant, and is well known for producing show onions. I've also got some Ailsa Craig seeds growing, and a new variety for me called Bedfordshire Champion. Onions are cheap to buy in the shops, but I find watching them grow fascinating.

Wow....no idea on the variety of mine as I save the seeds myself (same with carrots) but I think I might have better success if I had different seeds matched to my daylight hours of 12 to 14 hours (I read you can buy long-day, intermediate and short-day onion seeds....Ailsa Craig is a long-day onion needing 14 to 15 hours ie Scottish onion but near the tropics they won't bulb out as our days are never that long and we don't have proper seasons)....apparently in Alaska (almost 24 hours of daylight in their summer) the veg can get enormous.

Gardening is actually quite fascinating once you start learning all the little tricks....I have one mature peach tree where I kept burying the odd rotten peach in the hope of new trees. Then a guy on Youtube said to chuck a load of peach stones in the bottom of your fridge in an old margarine tub with an inch of soil...picked about 100 peaches for a mega-batch of home-made wine (hic) and saved 20 stones..I forgot about the stones and they ended up in there for about 6 months, opened the tub (a bit mouldy) and literally 15 out of 20 stones had a white root on them....I was awestruck, babbling to Miriam like a nutcase about my success (her reply was "I'm off to Walmart, it's easier to get veggies and fruit from there, heathen) planted them out in 2 litre tubs, 2 to a pot....now I have planted them on again into the ground and about 10 of them have gone crazy to the point that I am already trying to prune them to the shape I want...they are already 2 feet high.

Now I'm doing the same with Avocados, my first 4 stones are now tiny trees (not going as well as the peaches but at least I didn't need the "fridge trick" as they don't need stratification.)

I also realised why my first load of store-bought fruit trees failed, gophers were eating the roots. Now I only plant out trees in Tarquin-designed buried plastic laundry baskets ($1 from Walmart) wrapped in chicken-wire and secured with twisted wire ties.....I've got about 40 laundry baskets already out and buried to the rim, ringed with soil "dams" to trap the water for when the summer rains come.
Bought some gopher traps on the tinternet and I've caught 2 in the traps (tap on the head with a hammer, feed to vultures), One I flushed out with a water house (tap tap again) and one last week came out of his side-hole 5 feet away whilst I was setting traps in his main run a foot below ground (I could hear him scurrying and scratching as I was cleaning out the run ready for staking the traps) I think I must have clipped him with the shovel while I was taking out the first big sod of earth, he was sat staring at me on the garden path behind me next to a new pile of earth....I simply walked calmly up to him and tapped him with the shovel.....4-0 to Tarkers.

ps was the onion any good for eating or just for show?