Onion Results Are In

Wednesday was dull and warm. Apparently it was the warmest day of the year according to the BBC weather forecaster but that certainly wasn't true here as the highest we managed all day was 21.3°C.

On the plot I harvested the last of our autumn planted onions, Electric, which were planted as sets back on 04 October 2011. Other varieties already lifted are Dobies Autumn Champion, Shakespeare and Senshyu Yellow. These are all drying off in our home greenhouse.

This is how they looked when planted last October.

At the beginning of May this year the onions were starting to grow away well.

They’ve gone on to produce a good crop of onions which will certainly see us through until this year’s main crop of summer onions are ready. We harvested our first Shakespeare onions on the 26 June but it could have been any of the varieties as they were all ready to use at the same time.

Here are the weights for the individual varieties of onions harvested.

Obviously Senshyu Yellow performed the best. All the varieties produced onions of good quality and size. All the onions lifted have been disease free and just the odd bulb of each variety had seeded. The reason for the success of Senshyo Yellow I would suggest is that all the bulbs made it through winter so they’ve out produced the other varieties. I’ll now try to judge the storing qualities of each of the varieties.