Onion Family Competitions

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.

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.

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

I haven’t felt like gardening much over the last few weeks, and since there’s a lot to do popping outside made feel worse, not better. But on Sunday time and energy coincided, and I spent a happy two hours outside. In the intervening time the garden has transitioned into autumn, which shows off the blueberries at their best!

Given the shortage of onions during WW2, it’s not surprising that there aren’t many wartime recipes in which they play a starring role, but I did manage to find three – all of which required the onions to be parboiled. I’d never boiled an onion before, but we gave it a go, and (to save on fuel!) I boiled six onions at once in order to try all three recipes.

When the weather was still warm and dry, I lifted my onion crop. According to last year’s records, I planted 60 onion sets in 6 rows of 10 on 12th September 2017. I left them outside to dry, but then the weather turned wetter and I had to bring them inside to finish off. I wasn’t in a hurry to lift them, or use them, because we were still eating our way through the previous onion crop (chopped and frozen) that we hadn’t needed earlier in the year because of the plentiful leeks.

Randy Shropshire / Stringer / Getty Images

Collaborative post

Anna Stathaki

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!

Members of the Buttercup family are called Ranunculaceae. To grow the plants successfully beware the seeds tend to have a short period of viability and need planting straight away.