Preparing for Winter Onions

Wednesday was a pleasant enough day so I thought I’d better prepare a bed on the plot for our winter onions. The original plan was to have a green manure crop to dig in prior to planted our onion sets but the red clover failed to germinate.

 

My first job was to strim the grass around the bed. The grass hasn’t stopped growing all summer due to the wet weather. The ground was still wet from last week’s rain so digging over the soil was out of the question. Perhaps it was just as well the clover hadn’t germinated.

The wheelbarrow was still half full of water from last week’s wet weather. As the bed couldn’t be dug over I decided to remove the largest weeds and to then see if I could use the cultivator to loosen up the top couple of inches of the soil enough to allow the onions to be pushed in.

This worked quite well. After a couple of passes with the cultivator the soil didn’t look too bad. I sprinkled on fish, blood and bone fertiliser and then used the cultivator again to work this into the surface of the soil.

 

We originally planned to re-use the weed suppressant fabric used for our carrots for this bed of onions but unfortunately it just wasn’t anywhere near big enough. I had one last length of membrane left and decided to use that on this bed. After all these onions will be planted in October and remain in the ground until June or even July next year. That means lots of weeding would be needed for this crop.

It was a little bit too breezy for laying the membrane down but a few well placed bricks helped the job along. The long edges are held down by soil. We still have to decide the best way of cutting the fabric to plant our onions 　but we don’t need to make a decision until our sets arrive.