Homeschool Garden Club – Onions and Shallots

Onion and shallots are one of the staples in our meals that we cook day in and day out a fact we discovered in a survey for a maths session on tally charts and graphs. In the Orchard Training Garden Club we have found that onions and shallots are very easy to grown and we get a lot back for our efforts. There is a lot of variety with in the onion family from onions that cause you to cry, strong onion flavoured one, tall leeks, round red ones, sweet white ones, delicate and mild shallots, spring onions, chives and one of my favourite ones the Japanese walking onion!

They can be planted straight into the open soil in the autumn, as the ground has been warmed over the summer. they like a warm and sunny position.

if the temperatures are too low, with snow or ice over the winter they can fail, and if the spring temperatures are too low, there is a risk of bolting which means flowering. So, when planting we choose autumn-planting bulbs that are hardier to the cold temperatures.

We have also sown from seed. We have had a lot success with the seeds

Now is the time to plant onions and shallots for a mid-summer next year. So, it s a great project for us to start this month in the Orchard Training Garden Club.

This is now going to be our third year as a Garden Club to grow autumn onions. When we started we asked for help from our local allotment group and they were a great help.

Their suggestions were for onions: Onion 'Red Cross' as they gave us large bubbles that over wintered well. Onion 'Radar' that has a lovely mild flavour and keeps up to a year. For shallots: Shallot 'Biztro' as a reliable strong growing shallot.

We are going to start by planing in small batches over the coming weeks. We will be pushing them in the soil with the pointy sids up about 7 to 10 cm apart. and the rows need to a whole school ruler apart. Those of us who made our planting rules will just follow the pictures on the ruler. We will water if the weather is dry over the autumn but will stop after the autumn half term.

After Christmas we will add some bulky compost to increase the fertility of the soil with out making out too rich.

After the spring half term we will be watering with some sea weed-enhanced feed.

We will start to harvest after the summer half term. Remember to carefully fork up once the leaves have gone yellow. We will separate each onion and shallow and clean off and dry off in a cool light place and then we will come together to plait them in long strings.