|
Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 9, 2022 15:57:08 GMT -6
I planted onion transplants (purchased, not started by me) at the end of last week. It’s been very dry here in south central Texas, but we had the possibility for a few showers on Friday night, so I wanted to get the transplants in the ground. My husband had recently added manure compost to the beds, so I first made sure that the ollas were seated well and filled with water. I then did a bit of surface watering because I prefer to transplant into soil that is not bone dry. I used an old nose cone for a model rocket that for a dibble and set out three varieties: Red Creole, Texas Early White, and Texas Legend (yellow). I watered again with my sprinkling watering cans and was very glad when we did indeed get a quarter inch of rain on Friday night. Here’s a photo of the yellow onions. They’re in the new beds that we received last year, and it’s wonderful to have the extra space. Each variety has its own bed. I left the areas next to the trellises open so that we can plant there in the spring without disturbing the onions.
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 9, 2022 21:09:41 GMT -6
Wow! Thanks, for posting that. It's crazy to think it's nearly that time of year again! I just got my garden cleaned up about a week ago.
We plant onion transplants on Valentine's Day here usually. Not last year though ... Last year, it was about 15 below zero on Valentine's Day. Hopefully, that will not be the case this year, hope, hope.
|
|
|
Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 14, 2022 20:31:02 GMT -6
I planted more transplants yesterday. The original order had fallen a bit short in numbers, and I was supposed to get a few to fill the gap. The company instead sent two complete (and even generous) bunches, so I had to move into a whole extra bed to finish planting them. I was very grateful.
I had planned to plant potatoes on Presidents’ Day last year, which was the day after Valentine’s Day, I think. We only got down to 6, but that was plenty hard on the plants down here. I didn’t put in potatoes until two weeks late because of that. I had put the onions in last winter on December 9th 2020, I think, so I’m a whole month later this year. My crop last year did really well even with the crazy freeze in February 2021, so I hope this year can as well.
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 15, 2022 0:29:45 GMT -6
Back in 2011, it got down to 15 below zero and we had twenty inches of snow over a 10 day period that took several days to melt. Our potato planting time of February 14th was thrown off that year too. When we went out in the first week of March to plow the garden with the mules, they faltered. It was like they just couldn't pull the plow, so they stopped trying. We couldn't understand what was going on until we pulled the plow point up and saw it had frost on it at about 8" inches below the surface. The plow point was cutting mud on top of ice, then it slipped below the ice and just stopped our team dead in its tracks.
Some years are like that. There's no such thing as planning ahead if you live in Oklahoma. My computer crashed and I lost all of the photos I had of both mules pulling at once. we used to break 5 gardens in the neighborhood of about two miles radius from here. Every February, we'd end up plowing every day for about two weeks. All of those years working with a plow and this is the only photo I have left. (The garden in this photo was first year ground about 500' feet South of my house). It was about 50' x 120' back then. It's grown to 175' x 135' now. Some day I'll have to scale back, but I think I'll break it all again this year after it dries up some. (I use a tractor nowadays). I'm getting too old to plow with a team anymore.
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 15, 2022 11:16:13 GMT -6
Speaking of really good, homegrown onions; I used to grow a variety of onion called, "Candy" it was a yellow onion. (I never grew the red Candy variety). However, the yellow Candy variety was so good that a person didn't need any other kind. They were a mild-flavored onion, similar to what you would be served on a Coney at the old, 1920s Coney Island in downtown Tulsa. They were so big and so good, that we used to put an entire slab of onion on a bologna sandwich with a slice of homegrown tomato and call that a meal. You'd be eating high off the hog if you had a slab of Candy onion on a bologna sandwich.
I haven't grown any of them in several years though. Thrips got so bad around here that I couldn't pull off a decent crop anymore, so I stopped growing them. I used to plant 5,000 Candy Onions every Spring and would start selling them July 4th. I'd sell so many of them so fast that I'd be out of inventory by mid-August. 5,000 onion starts are about 3 wooden cases full at 50 to 60 onions per bunch. I would plant them in rows of white Plasticulture, 4 onions wide down the entire row. Though it has been several years since I've grown them, I still have people ask me for them every year.
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 16, 2022 23:36:24 GMT -6
I just saw an interesting video on how to make homemade floats to fit inside your ollas, so that you can tell how high the water levels are inside them without taking the cap off to check them.
|
|
|
Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 17, 2022 9:54:21 GMT -6
I just watched that video, and I was amazed when he said that that pot holds one gallon of water. He must have big hands because it doesn’t look that big to me (though I am a bad judge of relative sizes, I’ll admit). My ollas are a bit different in that I found straight sided pots with no drainage holes. Each of mine holds two quarts. I don’t need to glue anything on therefore, and I just use saucers for lids. Most of the time I don’t really have to check whether they need water. It’s Texas, it’s sunny, plants use the water, they can always use more. It would sure be nice to have an automated system, but for now the ollas help me keep consistent moisture at the plants’ roots, but they need me to fill them every week (or every couple of days in the height of summer). Our garden rain tank is really low right now. My husband is siphoning water from our back rain tanks back into our front tanks to make it easier to get it to the garden. I’ll need to get out and do some watering today once we’ve finished some inside tasks, and it has warmed up a bit more. My husband has the day off work today, so I’m giving the kids a day off homeschooling so that we can take care of some projects. Back to onions: @bon, thanks for your kind encouragement. I don’t think my results were my diligence. I think it was a good onion growing year despite the strange freeze in February. At least I could protect against that. This really warm winter worries me a bit more, though it seems to have been settling down for more cold finally. heavyhitterokra, I know Dixondale Farms (where I order my transplants) says that Candy is their most beloved onion. It’s an intermediate day variety, though, so I won’t be growing it. I’m always amazed when you talk about the quantities you plant (or used to plant). It took me a long time to do three bunches. Three cases boggles my mind.
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 17, 2022 16:32:53 GMT -6
I used to order onions from Dixondale back then. Candy onions were only about $60.00 per case at the time. They are around $95.00 now though. If planting on a smaller scale, it is way better to just be the first one at the feed store when their order of onions come in, so you can rummage through their cases to get pick of the litter, rather than being stuck with the culls when you buy multiple cases yourself.
5,000 onion transplants used to take me all day long to plant, just crawling along on my hands and knees, punching holes in the plastic with an old arrow and dropping onions as I went. (I use white plastic for onions). Black plastic will cook them in the ground. (I learned that the hard way). It really helped to lay them out ahead of myself, so I didn't have to make so many up and down trips to restock. I had my own kids, plus neighbor kids, and grandkids to help me back then. Now, I have to do everything alone. Good help makes a huge difference.
When I had kids at home helping me, I punched all of the holes myself. In the years to come, I found that an old ski pole made the best onion holes. The rubber powder basket part made a good depth gauge and the handle allowed one to walk along punching holes without bending over. (Way worth the cost of a ski pole at a pawn shop or second hand store). I never trusted the kids not to stab my drip tape under the plastic, so I kept that close at hand. Then, of course, I'd have to go back behind them to make sure they actually put onions in all of the holes. Kids are bad to get distracted or to pull a fast one on you and skip half a row. My youngest is getting married this coming weekend. He's 23 now. This will be my first week without kids in the house in 37 years. That is going to take some getting used to. I think learning not to cook for an army will be the hardest part. I can't get used to not cooking things in a stock pot. I was thawing out chicken leg quarters to make chicken soup Saturday afternoon and my wife had to talk me into only using one of them, instead of three. She said, "We'll never be able to eat all of that." It was hard to do, but she was right.
My mom died when I was 16 years old. I was the oldest of 5 kids, so it fell to me to become the cook for the family. (Believe me, you didn't want to be eating Dad's cooking). Then when I got married, I had 4 kids of my own, so for the past 44 years, I've been cooking for a pretty good sized crowd. Same thing with the garden. I've spent more than half my life growing enough veggies to feed several people. Thank goodness for the Farmer's Market and seed company sales, or else I'd have gone nuts trying to downsize.
|
|
|
Post by rdback on Jan 18, 2022 10:36:55 GMT -6
Congratulations on gaining a DIL Ron. She's a very lucky young lady!
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 18, 2022 10:47:25 GMT -6
She's a good one. I already got her broke in on helping me dig 200 pounds of potatoes.
|
|
|
Post by chrysanthemum on May 10, 2022 20:49:53 GMT -6
It has been a while since I’ve updated this thread. My onions are still growing, though I did pull a number of bolted ones (mostly the red variety, though a few whites and yellows) on Saturday. I had left them to flower for the sake of the pollinators, but it made the center stalk quite hard, too hard just to chop and freeze, so I pulled out the centers before I sliced. The red onions which bolted early were quite small, but there was some good flesh on the yellows and whites. I froze two pints after using what I needed to make the mushroom and onion gravy for our pork tonight. Most of my onions are still standing, but the bed that has the yellow variety (Texas Legend) has pretty much all fallen over. It’s supposed to be early maturing, and it looks to be working out that way with my planting. It won’t be long now till I harvest them. It’s probably hard to make out, but in the photo you can also see a plant label for “Las Tablas Dwarf Ajicito” peppers that are growing in there. My neighbor surprised me yesterday with a gift of plant labels and a special marker for writing them. My daughter was so excited by the marker that she labeled just about everything for me. I counted it as her handwriting and spelling lessons for school yesterday since it was quite a bit of work.
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on May 10, 2022 21:52:07 GMT -6
That was cool that you thought of counting that as a handwriting and spelling lesson. As a retired Teacher, I'd probably have done the same thing.
I zoomed in on the photo and noticed three little caterpillars crawling along between the Ajicito pepper and the banana pepper, two on the wood, and one on an onion leaf. Do you know what kind those are? If your daughter could figure that out for us, I'd give her an 'A' for the day in Science Class.
I also saw thrip damage on your onion tops. Those are the reason I had to stop growing onions here. They would stress my plants so badly that almost a third of my stock became unmarketable. Later in the season, after many of my small onions had been rejected by local chefs, I took the same onions back to the same chefs, saying, "These are the little onions that you garnish roast beef dishes with, because they are the same size as the little red potatoes that you boil to place around the edge of your presentation platters. Since they are smaller they are going to cost you almost a dollar per pound more than my larger onions, but they're worth it because they're so hard to find in the stores."
They bought every one of them for $2.00 per pound and were happy to get them.
|
|
|
Post by chrysanthemum on May 11, 2022 20:58:43 GMT -6
Do I get an “A” for the day if I answer what kind of caterpillar it is? I asked my daughter to see if she knew, but she didn’t remember. It’s a buck moth caterpillar. They are all over these days, and my daughter really doesn’t like them. I don’t think she’s been stung by one, but I have. It was painful, but I have more trouble with wasp stings. My son was crawling on a stone wall a couple of weeks back, though, and must have set his leg on one of them. He normally doesn’t cry for scrapes and things, but this one was bad. He ended up with what looked like a purple caterpillar-shaped burn on his leg, and we had to ice it to help with the pain. It’s just now disappearing.
I hadn’t realized that I had thrips on my onions. I know there’s damage there, but I had attributed it to our freezes and heat. I have had thrips attack and destroy fall-planted cucumbers before. I’ll have to be more alert about the onions in the future. Today I was more focused on the fact that I found aphids on some Asian greens that I have in a little planter on the deck (so that I can move them inside), and not too long after I had had the thought that I hadn’t seen a squash vine borer flying about yet, I spotted my first squash vine borer of the year. I did, at least, manage to squash it between my hands. I’m not normally that good.
|
|
|
Post by macmex on May 12, 2022 8:37:47 GMT -6
In rural Mexico they have more of those stinging caterpillars than we have up here. I remember one time, when we were living in a high cool rain forest environment and using an old fashion wringer washer, that one of them fell into our laundry, getting churned up in the wash. Apparently most of the caterpillar went out when the water drained, but it left little hairs throughout our clothes. We didn't notice until Sunday morning when we got the family dressed to go to church. We made it to church and sat in the front row before those little stinging hairs started to do their thing...
Had to pack up the whole family and head home before the service was over! We were itching and burning all over!
I've seen a fair number of the pack saddle caterpillars, here near Tahlequah. They sting really badly!
|
|
|
Post by heavyhitterokra on May 12, 2022 10:18:52 GMT -6
'A' for the day, for both of you!
I had to look that up. I didn't know what a Buck Moth was. After I found the photos, I knew that I had seen them around here before but I never knew their name.
I think I was in my fifties before I ever got stung by a caterpillar. To me, it felt like an electrical shock. I mean, the vibration of it. When electricity really gets ahold of you, you can feel the 60 cycles per second, sort of like the vibration that you feel when operating a cheap electric sander.
It was quite a surprise when I picked up the caterpillar and it had that particular defense.
A note about thrips:
Thrips are to onions, as chiggers are to people. (A tiny parasite). They burrow inside the hollow leaf of the onion. Once inside, they tumble down through the hollow tube, by way of gravity to burrow into the neck of the onion. This causes stunting of the plant, due to interference with the transfer of nutrients. Once inside the neck, thrips cause winter storage problems. Though they don't cause noticeable visual damage to the onion bulb itself at harvest time, they will cause decomposition to occur at the top of the bulb, just below the dried neck of the onion during storage. For that reason, I don't like selling them to my customers, so I stopped growing them commercially. I still grow them to eat, but I no longer grow them to sell.
Once thrips are inside the hollow leaf of the onion, it becomes very difficult to treat them. (Kind of like squash vine borers). Being how my garden is certified organic, I really have no defense against thrips and they tend to massacre my crop when I plant them en mass, as I did when I used to plant three cases of Candy Onions each year.
They are not quite as bad a problem if you only plant a few onions here and there, but they travel in a noticeable wave, from plant to plant, when there are large numbers of onions in close proximity to one another. The University of Wisconsin has a pretty good write up about thrips, along with some pretty good photos on their Horticulture website: hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/onion-thrips/#:~:text=Symptoms%20and%20Effects%3A%20In%20general,may%20eventually%20brown%20and%20die.
|
|