Onions!

November is my time for planting onions. Even as I'm typing, I'm preparing mentally to don my planting gloves and a jacket, ready to brave the rapidly dropping temperatures and rising wind - it is coastal fall weather and a strong and wet cold front is on the way.

I was distressed to find that most of the big stores (Home Depot, WalMart, large garden centers) reported that they no longer sell onion sets or plants in the fall. This tells me that the gardening focus has been narrowed to "spring only", when Christmas displays at last make way in the new year for spring displays. We all love that excitement when the seeds, tools, garden posters and magazines all hit the shelves. Despite grim weather, the promise of spring arrives.

But I digress. Here in southern Virginia, where the ground doesn't freeze, onions are wonderful when grown over winter. The secret is our raised beds, which keep the bulbs up above the cold, wet clay, and a light mix that drains water freely so the bed stays friable. (Same trick we discovered made all the difference in our raspberry patch.) Each fall I turn in a good dose of our freshly-swept-out chicken coop litter which is 75% wood chips and 25% manure. Seems to keep the raised bed fertile and light. I plant the onions now, let the plants slowly and generously mature over the winter season and pull the fully matured onion in early June, just in time to clear that bed for tomatoes and basil. Interestingly, I believe that the onion/garlic rotation keeps nematodes and funguses at bay in the soil so that our tender crops, like tomatoes, are healthier when they follow in rotation.

Like cabbages and winter greens, onions and garlic are a wonderful winter crop, allowing me to rotate our raised beds year around for maximum production. The ripe onions dry well in the barn out of the sun before the really humid days of July and August arrive. (Spring onions would be pulled to dry in October.) We use the "iffy" bulbs over the summer for cooking and salads, then the bulbs that I suspect won't hold for many more months. All the small or slightly sprouted onions are chopped up with the last harvest of our sweet peppers and frozen for use through the winter.