Onion Harvest

About half our onions tops started to flop over, a sure sign they are ready to come up. I knocked the rest over so the whole bed looked rather like one big onion blanket. I had turned the water off to each onion garden bed so they would be dry and the dirt would fall off easily, mud on onions is difficult. But then like mother nature is wont to do... it rained, totally unexpected and overnight.  Oh well, so we had to get the onions up now or the bottom ones covered by all the onion tops would rot. So away we went pitchforking and lifting the beauties out. I planted two full onion beds with the onions from Mr. H THANK YOU!!

Since the rain had ruined all my drying work, we had to set the beauties in the sun to cure for the day and get all the mud (which wasn't too much) off.

We lined them up along the garden fence, over the arbor, on the rim of 3 compost bins and 2 halved 55 gallon drums, plus one giant wheel barrow. About 1/4 to 1/2 will go into salsa making (provided we get any red tomatoes this year) and the rest of the onions will be for storage, or onion powder.  I even gave about 1/4 of the flat of onion starts  away to neighbor Kara and my Mom. Needless to say I HAVE ONIONS!!! YAHOO!!!

I waited a week or so to finish this post because I wanted to count how many onions we harvested, the total: 428 or roughly 140 lb. of onions. I braided about 1/4 of them and then trimmed the tops for the rest to be stored in burlap bags. It feels good to have put away that many. I have started making onion powder, I can only stand to do a little at a time because I cry so horribly when that many onions are cut up.

Life update

Well the new farm deal fell through, it's ok though since we are pretty content where we are now. When I could finally get the gal to tell me how much she wanted for her house/property, I about choked. Needless to say it was WAY TO HIGH, so we parted ways, I do wish her luck she is a very nice lady.

Since we are going to be here for at least another winter, I've decided to get a move on getting a generator connection. Right now we are totally grid tied and dependent. I would love a backup generator for some electricity, mostly just to run the freezers and possibly the furnace fan if we ever loose power for days on end. We have loads of "money" (read: meat/fruit/veggies) in freezer bags and were we to loose power saving that would be priority. All the dry and canned goods would be fine without electricity. Seeing hurricane Irene's devastation has made me even more jumpy in the prepping for emergencies department. Call me crazy but it makes me feel safer having 6-12 months of food for us and all our animals.

Jake and I would really love a wood stove, but that is going to be a much larger project that will take time. It may never happen at this house if we decide to move. So much of our desire for more land is garden and orchard space. However I am starting to think maybe along every fence I need to have an espaliered tree. Possibly redesign the front spiral and take advantage of space better. We'll see....