Bad Year for Onions

Wednesday was another cool day with some decent sunny spells and a bit less breezy.

 

A couple of weeks ago Sue had eased our onions out of the ground and they had been left to dry out on the plot. The forecast for the next couple of days is for some wet weather so I decided complete the harvesting job by collecting the onions to keep them dry for storing over winter.

 

We’ve had doubts all summer about how well our onions were growing. They certainly didn’t like all the wet weather. We grew 5 varieties of onions all from sets, Snowball and Setton from normal sets and Hyred, Hytech and Marshalls Fen Globe from heat treated sets. Snowball and Setton were started out in modules back on 14 February with the heat treated sets following on on 15 April as soon as they arrived. Once planted out in the plot initial growth was good.

 

This is Setton in early July beginning to grow away well after transplanting into the plot. But the rain and poor weather took its toll and the end result is a pretty poor crop of onions.

 

The worst result came from Hyred which is a crop failure having produced nothing larger than the sets that went in. Snowball a white onion is probably the next worse as the bulbs seem to be starting to re-grow and don’t look as though they will keep in store for very long. Setton, (probably benefiting from an earlier start), produced the best crop of decent looking onions but even then I’d expect better in a normal season.

 

 

Last year we had trouble storing onions over winter and decided to grow an extra couple of varieties to be sure of having enough onions to last us until spring. Just shows how this gardening is always unpredictable and no two years are ever the same.

Onion Harvest 2012