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Relaxed Farming Food: Onion
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| Onions are on the menu most days in the Relaxed Farming household! Whether it be raw in sandwiches for lunch; simmered with other veg for a
lovely
gravy or sauce; part of a stir fry or, for the small onions, roasted alongside potatoes and butternut squash. We have a most interesting item by the sink in the house - a stainless steel 'soap'! It is just a round shell of stainless steel, yet if you wash your hands under cold water with it the smell of the onions goes completely!! We have no idea why this should happen, we have sniffed the stainless steel soap after use and there is no odour to it, yet our hands are free of the rather awful taint of the onions after using it! Funny how the smell of frying onions is gorgeous, but the smell of it on hands is awful! We have experimented with both autumn planting (Winter Red and Shakespeare) in November and spring planting (Santero) in March. The November planted onions took 63 days to show above the ground, whilst the March ones took just 19 days! And all three lots of onions were harvested in June! What will we do next year? Probably go for the spring planting as this will free up one of the beds over the winter. Planting the onion (Santero) sets in November
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Our harvest of onions was really quite good this year - we planted 450 white onion and 300 red onion sets, and 'pulled' 423 and 280 respectively.
The issue now is to store them in such a way that they do not rot - the photo on the landing page for this section of the Relaxed Farming website show our white onions hanging in plaits in the sunshine. We have found that the secret to success is to allow the onions to dry until the green 'leaves' go dry and brown, and then to keep them in a light airy place.  |