Hello I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm and this morning I'm planting
onions in this raised bed here.
The sun is just glorious, it's a really cool, crisp day, the air is very damp
which is making the wind a bit chilly. But these onions are a little bit late
in going in. These should have been autumn sown and we're now in the winter,
so I really need to get these in. I have my two dibbers with a piece of twine
between them. Thank you Erica. And so I'm going to make some nice straight
lines and get these onions in. This bed is the old parsnip bed and at this
end I've still got, one, two, three, four rows of parsnips, but they will come out
over the next few weeks. And this end I'll put something else but for now I'm
going to get the onions in here and I think possibly as I lift the parsnips,
I'll either put in more onions or I'll put in some shallots.
So I'm using the string to give myself a guideline and when I did this with the
garlic last week I used my hands to create holes. I think it's just way too
cold so I'm going to go and find my little trowel.
Victory! It was just
where I'd left it.
So I'm going to make some neat holes about six inches apart.
This is really a guide for me more than a definitive decision.
We use a lot of
onions in the kitchen, they are the basis of many a meal.
And this variety is Senshyu Yellow.
So the yellow skin variety. I've grown them before I didn't
find them hugely strong in flavor but actually I really rather liked them.
So in they go, and as with all onions, shallots and garlic it's the root end
down. The easy way to tell that is that the pointy end goes up! Now I'm not
covering up the holes until I've made the holes for the next row. So here we go,
pop my string in about here, and may have these a little too close
together, let's have a look.
I'm aiming for them to be about six inches apart when they're planted, which
means as they grow it gives them a little bit of space, they're not going to
be touching. It also gives me room to get a hoe in between them to remove any weeds
if I want to or I can add more compost and mulch out any weeds.
Now the reason
that I didn't cover these holes over is that they then give me a guideline for
the next holes, of where they're going to go.
Because whilst I'm not obsessive about straight lines if you want to be able to
weed in between bulbs, having them in a fairly straight line really helps.
Once you've got organized it actually doesn't take very long to plant these, if you've
got the holes there, it literally is just a case of popping them into the ground,
pushing them in to the level that you want them to be. Now as with my garlic I
want these to be a couple of inches, so that the top is an inch or two, two
preferably, below ground level. I just think it helps stop the birds from
pulling them out. So once the little shoots appear they
have actually got some some roots to hold them into the ground. So I'm covering
over my first row but leaving the second row so I can see the second row as a
guidance again.
It's not a long job, it's not a difficult job and it's quite a satisfying one to
have got done!
It hasn't taken very long to plant six rows of onions.
I think now I'm also going to put a stick in here, which will show me the point at which
the onions are planted up to. So they're up to here.
The only other thing I want
to think about for these onions is to put some sort of covering over them To
try and a) dissuade the birds from pulling the onions out as their little green
shoots grow but also to try and discourage the local cats from using
this lovely bed as a toilet. And it's not just Monty, there are other
cats in the neighborhood. So I'm going to put a layer over it which will just,
hopefully, invite them to go and use somewhere else for their toilet rather
than this onion bed.
In a week or two's time I'll have access to lots of old
chicken wire which could be used over this bed, but in the meantime I've
got some plastic netting which is like a strawberry netting that you can throw over
to protect fruits.
I've had this for about three years now, I'll just keep on
using it on the grounds I don't really want to be getting plastics and then
chucking them away all the time. So they get reused and I'll do the best I can
with draping this over and fixing this, just to give these onions a little bit
of protection here for a month or so.
So there we go, that's the netting over the top. Now it isn't done in a
terribly fancy way, it is literally two pieces. I've got them as tight as I can
so that there's less chances of anything be able to get underneath them. I mean
certainly we don't want any birds getting underneath them, so I will just
go around the edges make sure that these are held down. A couple more sticks on the
side I think will do that. This isn't going to stay on for very long but
hopefully enough time to give those onions a really good chance to get going.
And so wherever you are in the world and whatever you've got planned for today, I
hope it's a good one and I also hope you'll join me again next time!