Onion Disaster!

Well I suppose that our plot at the Hill being trouble free forever was too much to hope for – and sure enough, we have our first – er – ‘challenge’!

I did mention that the onion set leaves were flopping all over the place – but assumed that it was ok because so were everyone else’s – NOT TRUE! Barry, dispensing advice as ever, had been busy up and down the Hill comparing onions, & when he came over to me carrying a book called ‘1001 Fatal Diseases & General Bad News for Vegetable Growers’ or similar & opened with ‘oh – not you as well’, I knew that there was trouble in store!

Apparently we all have something called Stem & Bulb Eelworm which is a ‘microscopic soil-living pest’ which kills young bulbs and produces soft bulbs which can’t be stored. Nice.

I felt better when I had a nose round other plots – David-other-half, Reg-next-plot and neat neighbour John all seem to have it. Not just us then. Treatment seems to be to sterilise the soil using something now illegal, or not to grow onions for years.

Clearly this is appalling news – although onions are cheap in the shops (but not red onions), I use loads to cook with, & they are not practical to grow at home as they need quite a bit of space.

I’ve shared our ills with the kind folks at the Grapevine, & they have cheered me up no end with the consensus being that you can still eat them, so there you go. Interestingly enough, although this affects shallots too, it doesn’t seem to affect autumn sown Japanese onion – so that’ll be at least part of the answer, then.

The weather has been dry all week – with a predictable change to miserable, cold & rainy weather just in time for the bank holiday weekend.

I did manage not to get wet yesterday at the Hill though, & the dry weather meant that there was not as much weeding to do. All the POTATOES are now showing, so I earthed up the main crop (i.e. the ones which are far enough apart to do so!) and sowed short rows of SWEDE (best of all), TURNIP (snowball) and ASPARAGUS PEA in plot A (legumes), some marigold and RADISH (saxa 3) in plot B (misc) & a row of BEETROOT (red ace) in plot C (roots).

I also dug in a couple of huge buckets of manure into a patch in plot B (misc) – supervised by my cheeky robin friend – then planted the Competition Pumpkin plant. I also planting out the Competition Sunflower – but that looks rather droopy (understatement!). I fed both with a ‘traditional high nitrogen feed’ to give them a boost – I’d really like to do well – wouldn’t it be great to win a prize!

Once the ‘jobs’ were out of the way, it was time to ‘collect the booty’, & I took home some POTATOES (rocket), LETTUCE (mixed), RADISH (cherrybelle), SPINACH (hector f1) – & the PRIZE which was a dozen finger sized BROAD BEANS (aguadulce) to be cooked whole with butter – what a feast!