Onion Ideas, Tips & Guides

Are you torn between the aromatic allure of fennel and the crisp crunch of celery? You’re not alone! These two versatile vegetables may seem worlds apart at first glance, but they share an array of similarities that can elevate your culinary creations and even impact your gardening choices. Dive in to unravel the fascinating parallels between Fennel vs Celery!

Growing onions is a popular task for millions of gardeners and knowing when to harvest red onions – along with yellow and white varieties – is important for success. If you harvest onions too early, it means a limited storage life. But, harvesting too late could mean a split or rotten bulb. In this article, I’m going to review two perfect times for harvesting red onions. One is ideal for fresh use and the other is best for optimizing storage life.

I spent a lot of my childhood holidays on the Costa del Sol, soaking up the Andalucian atmosphere. When I went to secondary school I chose Spanish as my second language (French was compulsory!), and ever since then Spain has been in my blood. I love the culture, and the food, although not their obsession with all things pork. As an adult I even spent a week living with a Spanish family, a holiday filled with memorable meals. They were worried I would be fussy, but the only thing I turned down was squid cooked in its own ink.

When we were shopping last week, we spotted a very good deal on two packets of salmon fillets – something we normally don’t eat. I’m not the biggest fan of salmon, and have never been able to understand why people rave about it, but we are trying to broaden our food horizons, so we bought them.

The focus on food waste tends to be on the fresh items we don’t manage to eat before they go past their sell-by date, but in our house there are plenty of pantry items that are hidden from view and remain unused, and my Inner Womble has been inventing ways to make use of them. Now that I’m at home for lunch, making fresh soup and bread is a good way of dealing with both of them – a blended soup can hide a multitude of less-than-perfect food items, and an inventive bread recipe can make use of some as well.

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

When I clear the next bed it will be time to plant the overwintering onions. I choose to plant my onions in the autumn for two reasons; the first is that I like having the beds filled overwinter. It’s nicer than having a bare garden to look at. The second is that they are harvestable about a month earlier in the summer, which means their bed is available for replanting a month earlier, and that works for me.

Last Monday evening I wandered out into the garden to shoo off a pigeon that was wandering around in my leek bed. On my way back inside I noticed the first flowers were appearing on my courgettes, and I did a little happy dance. Then, because this is the 21st century, I took a photo and posted it on twitter.

I invented this soup for lunch. I should say now that the only reason I weighed everything was so that I could write the recipe down for you – left to my own devices I just bung things in.

The onion flatbreads I made earlier turned out to be absolutely divine. I said I have been honing my flatbread skills, but to be honest I use the Moro flatbread recipe and it’s a doddle. The hardest thing to remember is to start at least an hour before you want to eat them, as you have to give the dough time to rise.

The garden and I are both grateful for the rain. The hot and dry weather doesn’t suit either of us. I’m happier in the cooler seasons of the year, which might explain why my autumn garden is going better than the summer one! The purple sprouting broccoli is starting to grow past its cabbage white damage, to the point where I am starting to stake it now, against the wind rock that will damage its roots in the winter. The flower sprouts haven’t got to that stage yet, but at least they are planted out in their final home and can start getting their roots down into the fertile soil. The leek bed is doing well, although there are one or two holes where seedlings have died. It doesn’t matter.

When I happened upon this recipe for caramelized onion marmalade made in a slow cooker, I just had to try it.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Home Front, the enlistment of every man, woman and child in the British Isles in an effort to beat Hitler through food rationing, making do and mending, salvage, growing your own and basically making the most of scarce resources with elbow grease and endless ingenuity. I’ve just read Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell, a biography of Lord Woolton who was the Minister of Food for much of the Second World War. He was in charge of ensuring everyone got fed, and improving nutritional standards was one of his aims. It’s unusual to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view, and the political situation wasn’t as united as may appear from our rose-tinted histories.

A few homegrown ingredients from the garden can completely transform bog standard burgers into meaty sandwich sensations.

One of the great challenges, during our summer of waiting to move, has been feeding ourselves. We packed away a lot of the ‘unnecessary’ cooking equipment for a few weeks, only to find it was out of action for a few months. With numerous false starts, I kept running down the cupboards and the freezer, in anticipation of a move date that never came. Stress levels rose, cooking mojo vanished and we ate far more oven chips than you can imagine.

Last year we had a great swathe of the garden paved. Our patio means you can get to most places in the garden without getting bogged down in mud, and was designed to draw you out of the house and turn the garden into an outdoor ‘room’. It does that job really well, and we love it. There’s no paving inbetween the raised beds; the ones we finished last year have a weed fabric and bark chip path. The newer set had grass and mud. But that changed yesterday when Ryan dug over the area and laid some paving slabs that we’ve recycled from my parent’s garden. It’s a gardener’s path – meant merely for practicality and not for show. You can’t see it unless you’re almost on top of it, but it means I can reach all of the beds from a garden path. Which is good – we’ve had enough rain this year that the garden has been a quagmire for much of it.

The latest edition of Joy Larkcom’s classic, The Salad Garden, has been sitting on my ‘to review’ pile for some weeks now. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it – I did read it. It’s just that it’s extremely dense, in the sense that it contains a lot of useful information about a lot of useful plants. It’s not a book you can read quickly, digest, and move on from. It’s a reference manual that will be part of your collection for years. Forever, probably.

Whilst April was a washout, May has seen some far nicer weather – particularly at the weekends! So it was time to dust off the bbq and our outdoor cooking skills and try cooking and eating outside once more.

It’s time to cut down on your carbon footprint and help lock carbon in the soil, and the good news is that this doesn’t have to be a self-sacrificing activity, it can be a win-win situation if you choose to grow your own food!

The garden and I have become strangers this year. It wasn’t supposed to play out like this. In the original plan, I was going to work hard during the spring and have the summer to play in the garden. But feast or famine is the freelancer’s curse, and I found myself constantly in demand.

THE WEEKLY RATION FOR TWO PEOPLE, UK, 1943 (D 14667) This photograph shows the amounts of milk, sugar, bacon, cheese, butter and chocolate received by two people per week in Britain. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205200125

The latest Cargo Dragon resupply mission docked with the ISS on Saturday, and the crew have been unpacking essential supplies. Their fresh food treats this time are Gala apples, navel oranges, cherry tomatoes, onions, lemons, mini peppers and ripe avocados.

One of the things that fascinate me is how astronauts from different cultures take different foods into space. When French astronaut Thomas Pesquet blasts off to the ISS later this month, for example, he’s taking four French meals specially created by a Michelin-starred chef. (Including a truffled pie of potatoes and onions from Roscoff, slow-cooked beef with mushroom sauce, almond tart with caramelised pears, and a freeze-dried cherry tomato dish. Heston Blumenthal created the first space bacon sandwich for Tim Peake.)

August is an interesting and busy time in a vegetable garden, as many readers will no doubt be well aware. Most of your attention is likely to be on harvesting and tending the summer crops.

The idea of growing our own vegetables and herbs is gaining popularity in the UK (possibly thanks to Felicity Kendal and ‘The Good Life’ circa 1975). However, not all of us have access to a garden, especially in large cities. So, what can you do if you would like to grow some veggies at home, but don’t have a garden or much space to work with? Don’t worry, you can still put those green fingers to good use!

“As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University” Blackadder Goes Forth, 1989

Mustard pickles are a yummy treat. This recipe is quick and easy to make – and it’s oh, so, delicious.

Looking to create a thriving vegetable garden in Texas? Explore the Best Vegetables to Grow in Texas that are in tune with the state’s warm climate.

Read on to learn about the Best watermelon Companion Plants and also the bad ones that will ensure you get the best and juicy fruits!

If you want to Grow Unlimited Supply of Onions in Big Plastic Bottles at Home then we will tell you how with some onion sprouts you already have at your home!

 

Red food stuff is a popular trend at the moment. Good leafy crops add vibrancy to a salad and you are probably eating well if you grow them yourself.

Allium christophii, common name Star of Persia or Persian onion. Perhaps they have dropped the religious ‘h’  to become Allium cristophii as a nod to the Iranian roots.

Show Onions

For your amusement or irritation here are some Christmas gifts for your favourite Knome. Hey-Hoe if you want to grow ‘Hey’ then there is this special Hoe.

If you are someone who loves to see veggies grow fast, then you must check out these delicious and Fast Growing Vegetables For Quick Harvest!