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Tuesday, Jul. 08, 2003 - 7:02 p.m. My various allium crops are becoming ready for harvest. Usually, I can space the drying-in-the-garage part of this process out enough where I have enough room to hang everything. Not this summer. Last week, my Vidalia onions were ready. They were right on time. They are still hanging up, drying up enough to cure them. If you try to speed this process up, or if you just pull them and bring them inside they tend to rot much quicker. It isn�t as important with the super sweet varieties- they rot quickly anyway you try to preserve them. But the long-keeper storage onions and the garlic really need this process to be complete. So, where was I- oh yeah�. With the Vidalias already in my small garage, I have now added a storage onion call �Yellow Globe�. It was advertised as a long-day variety, which means they grow best in northern climates. �Long day� means they should mature in the longest days of the year. �Short day� onions are for southern growers. The farmers put them in the ground in the fall, and then they grow slowly all winter (the short days). Then, they are harvested in early spring. Vadilia and Texas 1015 are examples of short day varieties. Even though the Yellow Globes were listed as a long day, they fell over and started drying at about the same time as the Vidalias. They are smaller than baseballs, but are uniformly round and health looking. I grew these to have cooking onions for the fall/winter months. If they were actually �long days�, they would have grown much longer and been much bigger. As they are, they will provide some extension of the non-store-bought onion season, but not nearly as much as I hoped for. I used the old milk scale at work to weight the crop. It totaled 16 pounds of onions, after subtracting the weight of the two buckets. Considering I only paid $1.29 for the seeds, that is a pretty good return on my investment, small sized onions or not�. The Yellow Globes came out of the ground yesterday. Since they grow on the surface, they popped out easily. Today, my plan was to harvest all of my garlic growing at work. I even left home 15 minutes early to give myself enough time to dig all of them from the ground. What I didn�t figure into the equation was how hard the soil had become in the past week. Garlic grows BELOW the surface, and the very high temperatures, plus no rain at the storage for 8 days made this a much tougher task. The ground was hard as concrete. I slowly dug up a few plants at a time, carefully removing any soil stuck to the root system of each bulb. It took me a lot of effort to just get the shovel into the soil. I had to slowly push down and rock, push down and rock, until the blade was beneath the next bulbs. I then slowly applied enough pressure to pop each one out of the ground. After twenty minutes of work (it was 6: 25), I had only removed � of the crop. I had to leave the rest for tomorrow morning. If it rains overnight (60% chance right now, but it sure looks like it will miss us), I will be able to harvest the rest in no time. I washed the garlic when I came home, and bundled the bulbs into 5 bunches. After hanging these on the hooks I have for this job in the garage, I am now out of space. I will either have to take the Vidalias down, or pound a few nails into the few open areas on the garage�s walls tomorrow to hang the rest of the garlic. I still have all of my late onions in the ground. Some of these bulbs are already big, and the plants show no sign of falling over. Enough pungent vegetable talk for one day, right? I�ll leave you with a link to a website. Enjoy the swatting of blood-thirsty mosquitoes inside, safely away from their disease-spreading habitat outdoors. Let some of them live for a little while- you can see the evil grins on their faces, and see their eyeballs when you finally end their lives. There I go again- more death in my �journal�. At least this one is just for comic relief������
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