Marsha Arnold
21.07.2023 - 23:01 / awaytogarden.com
YOU NEVER KNOW what will show up on your doorstep here in my rural community. I leave beans and squash in season for Jane down the road; Robin leaves me things pertaining to our common pursuit of mice that invade our very old stone foundations. (Her last “gift” was pecan-flavored “trappers’ paste,” I kid you not). My other neighbor’s dog–or so the card signed with a pawprint said–left me chocolate once, in a gift bag hung on my gate.But Deb, up the hill, outdoes us all. Deb leaves dirigibles. You know: like the Hindenburg—but of shallots, that is. “What in the world is that?” I asked in my email reply after the hefty thing had landed (pictured above, with two good-sized onions and a coffee cup for scale). And Deb emailed back thus:
“It’s a banana shallot,” she wrote. “I first saw banana shallots, also known as chef’s shallots, on one of Jamie Oliver’s cooking shows. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the thing–it is enormous, as big as a good size yellow onion and in truth, bigger than some bananas! I love shallots (the onion’s sweeter sister) and have grown the traditional variety for years from sets (or bulb-lets). The possibility of growing this new variety thrilled me so I set out to learn more and to find a source for sets or seeds.”
Thanks to Google, Deb says, it took her “about three minutes to track down the seed from Thompson & Morgan’s British site,” where she learned that her score–labeled as the variety ‘Figaro,’ was not a true shallot, but a cross between an onion and a shallot.
But she only had growing instructions for the UK, since that’s where she got the seeds. “I didn’t know how that would translate to seed-starting in the Northeast, so I decided to try starting seeds in January (like an onion) and in
Marsha Arnold
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