Planting Onions and Garlic

December 2008 - Planting Onions and Garlic

Time to plant the onions and garlic – we’re going for onion sets rather than starting from seed. We eat a lot of onions and always before it’s seemed that no matter how many sets we plant there aren’t enough of them and we’ve eaten them all before the next planting is ready, so this year we planted around 400 with the idea that these will last until the spring planted onions are ready.

The garlic we bought by mail order, some red and some white. They were sold by the kilo and came in whole heads. Karl had phoned them to find out approximately how many cloves we could expect from each bulb, so that we knew how many to order and he was told ‘about eight’. We bought enough that we reckoned would give us about 500 bulbs, so we could eat a load ourselves and have some over to use in pickles and chutneys and maybe sell some or give some to friends and family.

When the garlic order arrived, we took a few of the bulbs apart and realised what must have happened. Whoever Karl had spoken to must have only counted the knobbles round the outside of the bulb because by the time we broke them all apart and counted up, we had nigh on 1,400 cloves to plant out, which was a good lot more than we were expecting.

 The onions went into sunniest part of the big bed, the idea being that by the time the trees had leafed out, they would be ready to harvest and wouldn’t be affected by the shade. Some of the garlic went into that bed as well. The rest of it we put into three of the new beds on the far side of the garden, in the area that we considered got the most sun. Really we just wanted to see how they got on and how much difference there might be.

It’s recommended that you plant out garlic before the shortest day, December 21st, so that it gets the winter chilling it needs to promote bulb formation the following spring. We planted them around the 18th on a cold and windy day.

As I remember, the ground was wet and soggy and we were crouched down against a biting wind, squashing the bulbs into the mud and muttering ‘This is never going to work, they’ll just rot’

Of course, it’s always like that but at the time you can’t help but question your sanity. We were both wearing rubber gardening gloves but our fingers were numb and after half a dozen or so bulbs had gone in, the gloves would be caked with mud and we had to try and scrape it off on the grass. It was miserable.

I think that must be why no photographs were taken that day, because we just wanted to get it done as fast as we could and didn’t want to linger. Boy, it was good to get home. Walking through the door was like becoming a new being, suddenly surrounded by warmth and light, in a place where the world had hope again.

© Copyright Miranda Hodgson 2008