Saturday (3/30) was onion day (and asparagus day). I'll admit I'm not a lover of onion. I don't sit down and take bites out of onions (that's just crazy) or stack my burger with them. They are a vegetable I add to my cooking because, 1) recipes always seem to call for onion, and 2) I feel like I'm eating an actual vegetable in the aforementioned recipes I make.
For shits and giggles I just hopped over to Wikipedia to see what is special about an onion. Here's what I found:
"Onions contain chemical compounds with potential anti-inflammatory, anticholesterol, anticancer, and antioxidant properties, such as quercetin and glycosides like quercetin 3,4'-diglucoside or quercetin-4'-glucoside. Shallots have the most phenols, six times the amount found in Vidalia onion, the variety with the lowest phenolic content."
Thank you Wikipedia. I also appreciate the fact that onions are supposed to store well, either in a root cellar or as I like to do, dice them up in the food processor (best invention ever, I'm serious, forget the printing press), put them in ziploc baggies, and freeze them. Then I pop out a bag when I need them for cooking.
Onions are often grown from "sets" versus seeds. I think this just speeds up the process since they have a long growing season. You can also just leave onion in the ground apparently and pull them out as needed over winter. Who knew? I didn't.
Here are our onion sets. I opted for both yellow onion and shallots (not pictured). But the shallots will be planted later in our pyramid, when we get that up and running.
Again, I had my awesome child labor on hand to help with the onions. I used my new hoe to dig a very shallow trench. Then helper and I planted the "sets" every 6 inches using trusty yard stick as a guide. The package said to plant every 3 inches, but my helper's mom, in all her genius, pointed out that is entirely too close if we are hoping for large yellow onions. So 6 inches it was.
Once we were done planting, we ran into that whole marker issue. I grabbed some rocks and tried to write onion on them in sharpie. Didn't work out to well. I think I'll be more thoughtful in coming weeks to paint our markers so we remember where all our plants are. Kinda important. We had onions left over, I tried in vain to get my grandpa to take them and plant them for me. Soooo didn't work, he hates the stuff. :-)
For shits and giggles I just hopped over to Wikipedia to see what is special about an onion. Here's what I found:
"Onions contain chemical compounds with potential anti-inflammatory, anticholesterol, anticancer, and antioxidant properties, such as quercetin and glycosides like quercetin 3,4'-diglucoside or quercetin-4'-glucoside. Shallots have the most phenols, six times the amount found in Vidalia onion, the variety with the lowest phenolic content."
Thank you Wikipedia. I also appreciate the fact that onions are supposed to store well, either in a root cellar or as I like to do, dice them up in the food processor (best invention ever, I'm serious, forget the printing press), put them in ziploc baggies, and freeze them. Then I pop out a bag when I need them for cooking.
Onions are often grown from "sets" versus seeds. I think this just speeds up the process since they have a long growing season. You can also just leave onion in the ground apparently and pull them out as needed over winter. Who knew? I didn't.
Here are our onion sets. I opted for both yellow onion and shallots (not pictured). But the shallots will be planted later in our pyramid, when we get that up and running.
We had so many "sets," I ended up planting two rows of onions. Probably at least two dozen. That's a lot of onion...
Once we were done planting, we ran into that whole marker issue. I grabbed some rocks and tried to write onion on them in sharpie. Didn't work out to well. I think I'll be more thoughtful in coming weeks to paint our markers so we remember where all our plants are. Kinda important. We had onions left over, I tried in vain to get my grandpa to take them and plant them for me. Soooo didn't work, he hates the stuff. :-)
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