I hope you will be joining us at the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society’s annual “Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Show”, next Tuesday, August 11 from 1:00 p.m. till 5:00 p.m. at St. Gerard’s Parish Complex on Third Avenue! Bring a friend (or two or three!) and come browse through exhibits of vegetables and fruits, all kinds of flowers, creative flower arrangements, and stunning plant displays. Then sit down and enjoy coffee and tea and dainties, all included in your admission price! It’s the perfect way to spend a summer afternoon! That’s next Tuesday, August 11, from 1:00 p.m. till 5:00 p.m. at St. Gerard’s Hall. Everyone is welcome!
The other day, we were visiting some very dear friends, and they took us on a tour of their wonderful garden. Neat rows of thriving vegetables filled their garden plot, but as we came to the onions, the Lady of the Garden shook her head and said “I guess we don’t know how to grow onions!”. Not true, because they have such a lovely garden including the onions, but this is what she was concerned about: the tops of the onions were already starting to lay flat, even though the bulbs were not yet as big as they hoped.
Our onions are doing the same thing, so I thought I would do some homework and try to find out why. I found many opinions of why this is occurring, but the most consistent reason given seems to be the extreme of temperature and moisture. The American Horticultural Society Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening says that “The onion naturally grows tops in cool weather and forms bulbs in warm weather. But both temperature and day length control the timing of the bulbing. Varieties are classed as long-day and short-day.”
Uh-oh, what does that mean? Let’s take a little side-trip of information and talk about these terms. Long-day onions, which are grown in the North, require fourteen to sixteen hours of light to form bulbs. They are planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. Short-day onions, which are commonly grown in the South and planted in the fall to grow over the milder winters, require about twelve hours of sunlight.
Now you’re probably asking what this has to do with our onion tops starting to lay flat. Only this: it seems that the extremes of heat that we have been experiencing, plus the extra moisture, can make the onions mature at a faster rate, even before they have achieved their full “onion potential”. But since the tops are just lying flat and not yet starting to turn brown, we have to assume that the leaves are still a working part of the onion, and so we should just let them be and hope that they will continue to grow.
I know some of you probably have onions that are still standing tall, and perhaps that is just one of the lovely mysteries of gardening: every garden is different and responds different ways in different years. Even if we do everything exactly the same year after year, there are many outside factors that we can’t control that affect our garden’s yield.
Isn’t this a delicious time of year? I remember how exciting it was every summer when Mom and Dad and I had the “first meal” with almost everything from the garden: tomatoes, peas, potatoes with fragrant dill, sliced cucumbers, carrots… could anything taste better? While our garden is smaller than my sweet parents’ garden was, we’ve had “garden angels” who kindly shared raspberries, saskatoons, beans, and cherries with us, and we thank them for their kindness!
Hope to see you all on Tuesday, August 11 at our show! Have a great week! Visit us at www.yorktonhort.ca
