The Never Ending Crop!

  The garden is home to a lot of "recycled" plants.  Celery is quickly taking over one box and it started as a leftover root chunk from a bunch out of the grocery store.  Basil is popping up everywhere from seeds that my sweet daughter-in-law gave me several years ago from her garden. Potato plants that fill flowerpots started out as a possible french fry and wound up as a sprouted potato.  And onions...onions are in every garden box, every flowerpot every vacant spot I can find. These things tend to take over the place once you realize that after buying just one sack at the grocery store, you should never have to purchase another onion.  Saving the root end of an onion, sticking it in the ground somewhere and giving it the freedom to do whatever it wishes, will see you with more of these bulbs than you will ever need.  What started as an experiment of "recycled" gardening has pretty much taken over most of my space.  

This onion had to "escape" the garden box to bloom. The box was too crowded with onions for it to successfully bloom otherwise.

  This morning while I was out picking tomatoes, I noticed that a few of the onions were going to seed.  Well, now.  That is good....and bad. Good that the plants are reseeding themselves and I shall have numerous more onion sets to plant.  Bad since once an onion blooms, it is not as firm as it is during prebloom stage.  Not that this makes the onion inedible but rather that it makes it rather unstable when storing.  Onions are some of those things that can just be harvested, cleaned (not washed) and plopped or hung in a dry place.  They will stay usable for months!  Pop always stored his by hanging them by their leaves in the barn.   It was not uncommon to find hundreds of onion bunches dangling from the rafters in the old barn.  The onions stayed perfectly fine in their swinging state!

  As for the onions going to bloom in the garden, a few will stay to produce seeds while most others will be pulled and hung to dry, chopped and placed in the freezer or canned. Some will eventually be replanted to start a new crop.  Onions are truly a never ending crop as long as you care for them properly!