I think they are better, and better in several ways.

First, they're fresher, and that makes them more nutritious. Fresher is healthier because nutrients degrade from most fresh fruits and veggies beginning almost as soon as they're picked. So, an onion that goes from your garden straight to your table, as mine often do in spring and summer, is more nutitrious than a store-bought onion that can be weeks and months old by the time you buy it and eat it.

Maintaining the nutrient level is one reason why I divide my crop after harvest and cure some for long-keeping in the cellar while chopping/slicing the rest of the crop and freezing it right away before the nutrients degrade.

Home-grown onions are 'pure' in the sense that they haven't been sprayed with pesticides, fungicides, etc.

Home-grown onions taste better too. Their flavor is fuller, richer, and stronger than the same types of onions from the grocery store, and that's something to take into consideration when cooking from scratch.

Dawn

Thanks again, Dawn. Gee, this planning is so much fun! I remember as a kid that my dad grew green onions and we kids just ate them plain with a little salt on the side! My dad really loved salt. Especially on watermelon - go figure.

Susan

My dad loved salt on watermelon too!

I agree with all that Dawn said. They are like a home grown apple. You don't know what you are missing till you raise one and after you have a store bought one never completely satisfies you.

I'm a heavy salt user but not a real melon lover. My dad and family uses salt on watermelons and cantaloupes. If I eat either it will have salt. I may only eat 1-2 slices of either in a summer. Why I have quit growing them. My boy loved them and grew them and that was the last time they've been grown in my garden.

Have bought one storage container and also a building for storage that should be up in 2-3 weeks. Hopefully that will let me tear down an old dirt floor building I had been storing things in. So trying to decide what I will grow in that area. Jay

Susan, Planning is more fun than anything else. As long as we are in the planning stage, everything is just "perfect" in the garden we have planned in our minds and nothing has happened yet to bring us disappointment.

I try to do most of my planning in fall, long before the seed catalogs arrive. That way, I'm making variety choices based on rational facts and not on the tempting photos and prose in seed catalogs.

Jay, You said: "Have bought one storage container and also a building for storage that should be up in 2-3 weeks. Hopefully that will let me tear down an old dirt floor building I had been storing things in. So trying to decide what I will grow in that area. Jay"

Are you kidding me? Ooooh! That's WONDERFUL! More room to grow! I guess the horses can breathe a sigh of relief because their pasture is safe for another year.

I don't grow as many melons as I used to because I'm growing so much more of everything else, and also because the only place I have good sandy soil for melons is becoming increasingly shady as the trees continue to grow taller and cast more shade. As recently as 4 or 5 years ago, I'd grow 15 or 20 kinds of melons and now I just grow a handful.

I almost have my 'grow list' for all veggies complete, although I haven't decided on a few things---like potatoes---just yet.

One problem with planning this early is that it gets me in the mood to plant "now" and we know that "now" is not exactly the right time. I still haven't mastered that whole "patience" thing yet and I doubt I ever will.

Today Tim and I will finish putting in the glass windows on the south wall of the screened-in porch, and then it will be a walled/windowed sunporch instead of a screened porch.

It will be easier to keep a sunporch warmer than we could when it was a screened porch, so I'll be able to start more seeds there and grow them on until they reach transplant size instead of raising them inside the house.

Hopefully, this means I won't be carrying flats of little plants back inside and up the stairs to the spare room on cold nights next winter and spring, and will be able to just plug in the heater and leave them out there, on the porch. So, I'm almost ready for planting time now! Unfortunately it is still many weeks away.

I also will have to negotiate with the cats. They loved the screened-in porch and I'm sure they'll love the sunporch even more. I suspect we will eventually have territorial battles about the cats not sleeping on top of flats of seedlings. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Dawn

Heehee, Dawn! I have 4 cats as you may have seen me mention before, all with distinct personalities, but all love to eat plants. I have to be careful what I start in the house, and have to construct barriers around some so that the cats cannot experience a buffet.

I don't have a sunroom, just a "sunny" room with double patio doors to the deck, facing south, and a large east facing window, too. The cats love this room, especially in winter when the deciduous trees have lost their foliage and they can get more sun to their upturned bellies! They love to roll around, getting into contorted positions, most of which expose their tummies to the sun. They think this is "their" room and look completely indignant when I come in to check things out, like I'm the alien!

Yes, planning is so much fun. I am usually just restricted to planning the butterfly and/or wildlife garden, but now I get to include veggies - thanks to you all. I didn't come into it graciously, as you well know. In fact, I, like the cats, was quite indignant that nobody wanted to talk ornamentals. I slowly came around to the thought that perhaps I should "just try" to grow some veggies, especially with the economy, and just the fact that I really DO like to experiment with different things. Little did I know that it was going to hit me **splat** in the face like a big ole watermelon (somewhat literally)! Anyway, now I'm trying to figure out ingenious ways to convert what little space is available into veggie patches/containers. I already have the pollinators so what's a "few" more containers tucked in here and there.

I have noticed that some of you order your onion sets/plants from Dixondale and wondered why. Do they have varieties that aren't offered locally? Are their plants better? Cost efficiency? Just curious, altho I'll probably get some sets at Horn's to start out with.

Susan

Susan,

As long as all we "cat owners" (that's how we think of ourselves, but the cats undoubtedly think of us as "cat slaves") insist upon growing plants, the cats will think the plants are theirs and not ours. I don't have houseplants in the house because the cats do destroy them.

Your room with the southern exposure sounds perfect for raising plants. Our screened-in porch is on the southwestern corner of the house and it has been a great place to harden off seedlings, but now I hope to be able to raise them there from start to transplant size. I always believed we'd eventually turn it into a sun porch once the shade trees we planted years ago were tall enough to shade it in summer, and now they pretty much are, so the conversion from semi-open screen porch to enclosed sunporch is occuring. We just put in the last window a few minutes ago. There's still a lot of work to do, but at least the 'holes' are now filled with windows.

I know you were frustrated as veggie talk began dominating the forum, but I never thought you were less than gracious....just that you were frustrated. We still can (and sometimes do) discuss lawns and ornamental gardening, but it seems so many foks (and not just those of us here on this forum) are growing lots more veggies, fruits and herbs so that does tend to dominate the discussions.

I am glad you're enjoying growing veggies for consumption instead of for the butterflies and moths, and that's not anything against butterflies and moths---I garden for them too, but I want for them to eat "their" plants and leave "my" veggies and fruits alone. lol

Dixondale is my onion supplier of choice because I cannot find most of the varieties they carry here. It's that simple for me, but you know I am not in a shopping mecca here in rural Love County. Some folks on this forum find the "Candy" onion variety in stores in the Tulsa and OKC metro areas but I've never seen "Candy" onion transplants in southern OK or in north central Texas, so ordering online works for me.

It was Bill P. from the Dallas area, who used to post on GW as "GoneFishin'", who convinced me to try Dixondale because he used them and was so happy with the harvest he got from their plants.

Beyond the fact that Dixondale has the specific varieties I like to grow, they also have fresh, green, just-pulled-from-the-ground onion plants. I believe they either pull, pack and ship in one day, or they pull and pack one day and ship the next. When their plants arrive they are healthy, fresh, well-hydrated and ready to grow. By contrast, the onion plants I see in stores (unless I stumble upon them the first day or two after they arrive) tend to be brown instead of green and they look pretty dehydrated. They'll still grow, but they get off to a slow start compared to the fresh onions from Dixondale.

When the weather allows, I always get a great harvest from my Dixondale onion transplants. The last two years, the onion harvest has been disappointing, but that is because the weather has been uncooperative. In 2009, the 12.89" of rain that fell in one day really set back the onions even though they were in a raised bed. (Raised beds do drain better than grade-level soil, but it is hard to overcome more than one foot of rain in one day.) In 2010, my onions endured sleet and snow well after they were planted, and then had spring weather with some very hot days and some very cold (freezing) nights even in May and they produced a moderate crop but not a large one. So, I am hoping for better cooperation from the weather in 2011 because I need another big bumper crop of onions like we had in 2008, when I put about 150 lbs. of chopped and sliced onions into the freezer and an equal amount into the root cellar. Believe it or not, we still have 3 or 4 lbs. of those 2008 onions in the freezer, and they still taste just fine when I cook with them. It is amazing to me that 2008 essentially gave us three years worth of onions in one year.

Dixondale's plants are not cheap, but GoneFishin' told me long ago that their quality made them worth the price, and he was right. The price per bundle drops progressively as you buy more bundles. A few months ago, Seedmama mentioned she'd put together a group order for Dixondale this winter. If she has time to do that, I'll certainly participate in the group order.

One year I grew leeks from their leek transplants and they were the best leek crop I'd ever grown by far, and they made me even more of a "believer" in their quality than I was before I tried the leeks.

Dawn

Dawn:

Isn't now the time to put in leeks, garlic, shallots and those types of bulb plants?

--Robert

Robert,

Of course you are correct about that!

Fall is the OSU-recommended planting time for garlic and leeks, and probably for shallots too although I don't even think they mention shallots in the Oklahoma Planning Guide or Fall Garden Guide.

Sept. 1st is the recommended date for leeks, and the note on the planning guide says that is the date to set out plants started from seed six weeks before.

Here's how I feel about that. At our house, July is hot and miserable and dry and real rain relief usually won't come until September at the earliest. There is no way I'm going to start leek seeds in July so I can transplant the small plants out into the ground on Sept. 1st when it is still hotter than you-know-where here. That leaves Dixondale Farms as my best option.

I let Dixondale Farms start the seeds in July or August or whenever the appropriate planting time is in south Texas. They ship me the young plants in Jan. or Feb., I transplant them into the ground and I harvest lovely leeks about 100-120 days later, so let's say in June from a February planting. Had I grown my own from seed in July transplanted as plants into the ground in Sept., I'd likely be harvesting in mid-Spring.

So, I suppose you can raise leeks for spring harvest or summer harvest here, depending on when/how you choose to plant them.

Dawn

I like to plant onions and spinach in a wide row that will later become where the okra goes in mid May. White granex is my choice, bulbs only get about golfball sized for me but the white grows about 3 or 4 inches up into the tops.

Keith

Yep. I'll be posting the Dixondale onion thread in about a month.

Thanks for the update. I'll be watching and waiting.

Ooh, I love Leeks, too! You see, there's just not many veggies that I DON'T like. That's why it's so hard for me to understand why my kids don't have a broader veggie palate. When they were growing up, we had a vegetable garden in Norman for a long, long time, and out of season, we participated in the Food Co-op on the OU Campus, so I cooked lots and lots of vegetables. But, my kids just never took to them like I did when I was a kid. (Pssssst....I think my children are changelings)

Anyway, I remember GoneFishin'! There are so many that aren't here any more. I kept in touch with TomatoHornworm for a few years, but have lost track of her now. She was last in SE Kansas where I grew up, raising sphinx moth cats fast and furious because in that area a lot more can be found than in my citified garden. Also, OKC1. She used to participate a lot, and I remember her because she grew her Brugmansias in the ground (sharp intake of breach, "oh, no, she didunt"!) But, yes she did and was quite successful at it. I would love to see some of them posting again.

Oh, and BTW, my cats are very gracious. They allow me to
live in their house and pay their mortgage. I think one of them "borrowed" my credit card the other day to buy some catnip - cuz I didn't plant any for them this year. Do you think they're trying to make a point? Sneaky cat!
Susan

Susan,

Like it or not, I think our kids grew up in a fast food world even though we were cooking great meals at home. It seems that most people who are used to 'fast food' seem to think potatoes and onions/pickles/lettuce are the only veggies they want to eat. Our DS eats more veggies now that he cooks a lot at the fire station when he's working, but there were years where I felt like the only veggies he was eating came in a hamburger combo meal.

I miss Gone Fishin', TomatoHornworm, OKC1 and the others a lot too. When someone 'disappears' from Garden Web, I always wonder where they went. Of course, in GoneFishin's case, someone figured it out and let the rest of us know. In a lot of cases, I suspect people move away or stop gardening or maybe just get too busy to spend much time online.

I'd love to grow my brugmansias in the ground the way OKC1 did, but with slow-draining red clay and periodic heavy rains of 6" to 9" to 12+" of rainfall in one day about once a year, I just don't think they'd make it, so they stay in their big pots. One thing about brugs in big pots is they can go into the garage at night and since they stay warmish at night, mine cycle in and out of bloom all winter long, which gives me (and the bees) something in bloom to enjoy anyway. Yesterday I was deadheading one and noticed bees were still working the flowers, even the crumpled, wilted old ones, so I backed off and stopped deadheading and left those flowers on the plant for another day.

I made the mistake of planting catnip for the cats one year and now it reseeds anywhere and everywhere, including all over the veggie garden and even in the middle of the lawn. I don't mind it though, because if you let it flower, it attracts tons of beneficials.

Our cats perform an invaluable service by controlling rodents which in turn decreases the number of snakes around since there's fewer voles or field mice for them to prey upon. However, they are high-maintenance, demanding exactly their favorite brand of food, treats, cat toys and, of course, a warm lap to sit on every night. I have one cat who expects to sit on my lap precisely at 7:05 p.m. every evening.....well, now at 6:05 p.m. since the time change....and if I am not sitting on the sofa, she sits there and waits for me. Last night I was 15 minutes late and she wasn't happy because she had to watch the 6 p.m. news without me. It makes you wonder who's in charge. The cats, of course, don't wonder about that at all---they know they're in charge.

Dawn

Susan, Dawn,
I don't hardly even visit the GW forum anymore. I do miss those you both mentioned. Another one is Brazos Valley. I'm still growing varieties he sent me. There are many reasons they quit posting. Some are like me. Others have had a change in interest, hobbies, ect. They all added so much to the forum and also shared so much gardening knowledge. Jay