millymoo,

The one I use is found on the web, just type in 'Sweet Onion Relish'. It shows a bowl of onion relish. It is very good. It calls for a red bell pepper but I didn't have one so omitted it and it was just fine. It only has one cup of sugar, so if you use sweet onions it is plenty sweet. I have made it the past couple of years and intend to make it again this year. If you can't find it I will copy it on here for you.

Some of my onions are falling over. Today, I noticed that these are the ones that are not bolting. The leaves are still green. Initially, I thought the dog trampled on them, but nope.

I've never gotten this far with onions. Do I harvest or wait until it stops raining?

I was wondering the same thing. Do you pull them as soon as the tops fall over?

I would leave them until the neck is dry.

Ty for the recipe auther. I needed something to do with the onions that have bolted.

Wait for the rain to stop for a day or two before harvesting, if you can. Here's a link on harvesting & drying onions.

I like to leave them in the ground for 7-10 days after the tops fall over. This allows the onion bulbs to continue to feed off the stored energy in the leaves, and it will give you better onions. Then pull them, and dry/cure them in a place where rain won't be falling on them. I dry mine on tables on the patio, the porch or in the greenhouse (with all doors and vents open and a fan on). I like to cure them for 2 or 3 weeks to make sure they are thoroughly cured. The better they are cured, the longer they tend to last in storage.

However, if your onion tops start falling over and you are getting heavy rain daily, it is better to harvest them and get them out of the rain to prevent disease.

There weren't too many. I picked a few to give away and eat.

I sold some more greens and bought some more tomato plants. Could not resist. They needed me and most of my backups got hailed on so hard they are in bad shape and I only have 122 so far in the ground and i didn't have any of these kind and they were cheap

Thanks jdlaugh, it's been a couple years since I've grown onions and that year they all came out early as it was too wet.

I'm grateful for auther's recipe idea. The year before last I hauled in all the onions and processed them right away cleaning, skinning, chopping and freezing. (Grateful Dawn mentioned to double bag them in the freezer!) Doing them all at once was a mistake, but I got through it.

Over the last 4 days I've been processing little by little. I hope, tomorrow, to make some sweet relish with a few. My husband prefers sweet relish in his tuna salad although he quite enjoy's Dawn's sweet pickles of which I greedily took numerous jars home that year.

sweet relish recipe

Kim,

You don't have to explain to any of us about "needing" more tomato plants. We. Understand. It. All. Too. Well.

I hope the new plants have a chance to bloom and set fruit before the heat sets in. Since it has been so cool and mild in May, I think there's a good chance of that happening.

Bon,

To me, the pickling, canning, freezing and dehydrating of the harvest is almost as much fun as the growing. Then, when you get to do your grocery shopping from your own pantry, freezer, fridge or root cellar storage, that's the coolest thing ever. I love breezing right past the produce section of the grocery store at this time of the year because there's nothing there that we need that we don't already have at home.

I also enjoy planning my meals spur of the moment by looking at the garden in the morning and seeing what is available and then figuring out how to turn it into meals.

Every now and then I even find something in the deep freeze that I had forgotten was in there....like a quart of frozen peaches or something, and that is always the most pleasant sort of surprise.

A lot of the necks of my short day onions fell over last week, and more have been falling ever since, so today I harvested all the ones whose necks were broken---and that would be Texas Legend and Southern Belle Red. If the rest of the onions behave as they normally do, the next onions to be ready for harvest will be the Texas Supersweet 1015Ys. They run a little over a week later than Texas Legend as near as I can remember. Then, after that, there's another 6 varieties or so in waiting, both intermediate days and long days. Spreading out the harvest over a longer period of times means I don't have to process all the extra onions too quickly. Now, I need to dig out my onion netting tubes for the dry storage of all the ones we'll eat fresh.

I love this time of year, but it is a lot of work to stay caught up on the harvesting. If the garden and I have done everything correctly, June and July go by in a whirlwind of harvesting and canning.

I'll probably make some sweet onion relish next week. I try to do my canning on days Tim and Chris both are at work because then the house is nice and quiet and there's nobody underfoot in the kitchen.

Dawn

I knew you would understand. I felt kinda silly explaining to my son why I had 5 new tomato plants in the back of the car. I have this addiction. Pretty well sums it up. These are a good size and some blooms so hoping for the best if not they will be good when heat is over. Last year I had several that never made in the spring but boy in the fall they went to town.

I may try that onion relish this year. Sounds really good.

HaHa. So many reasons you HAD to buy those tomatoes. No more tomato plants for me. I had stopped taking care of my left-overs and they were looking pretty sad, but a friend wanted to take them and nurse them back to health, so I gave them all to her. I must confess that I did buy 4 bell pepper plants that just jumped into my hands while I was shopping for flowers at the nursery.

I hope my onions finally decide to bulb. I don't remember them ever taking this long before. The daylight hours are long enough, but it's been a long time since we have had nice sunshiny days. I am ready for some sun.....not more rain.

My biggest crop at the moment is mosquitoes. Man they are bad.

Kim, I just don't even try to explain. After all these years, Tim and Chris finally get it and know not to be surprised if I come home with some seemingly random tomato plants long after the garden is already full. I'm not sure what they are thinking at such times, but they don't say a word. Honestly, from February through at least April, they'd probably be more shocked if I didn't come home with an occasional tomato plant or 3 or 6.

Carol, Well, how odd that is. It must be the lack of sunshine. Sunshine returned here yesterday and I took a long, hard look at my onion plants. They are fine and are bulbing up on schedule so far, so I cannot complain.

I did notice when harvesting the Southern Belle Red and Texas Legend that I had every size onion in the world. The largest are almost softball-sized, which is unusual for the short day types here which seem to mature almost before they can get really big most years, and the smallest in general are about tennis ball sized and no two onions really are the same size. Then, there's a couple that only made it to ping pong ball size, and I didn't see anything that indicated why their growth was so poor---they had lots of foliage, but not a big bulb. I suppose the wide variety of sizes at maturity reflects the wide variety of sizes that I had at planting time.

The next ones to mature will be Texas Supersweet `1015Ys and they are going to be larger than the varieties I just harvested, and really they look to me like their necks could fall over any day now and I'd be happy with the sizes that they are.

The rest of the intermediate and long day types are not bulbing up much yet, except for Highlander, which should be about the last onion variety to mature. It is considered either a really late intermediate daylength type or an early long daylength type and it does bulb up earlier than I'd think a long daylength type would. The fact it is bulbing up earlier than the intermediate daylength types seems odd, but it is what it is. This is only my second or third year to grow it and last year was a terribly rainy year, so I still don't really know what is normal for it.

While we like to think of our gardens in terms of how things usually happen, it seems like mine is behaving in a more erratic manner every year, and it has to be linked to the weather. It seems like it is getting harder and harder to expect things to happen at the same time as before or in the same way as before.

Dawn

I was feeling pretty good about my onions until I went out to the garden a while ago and one of my largest tomato plants had a gopher hill next to it, the tomato doesn't seem to be hurt, (surprise) but next to it was a large onion pulled down a hole and 3 smaller hills next to 3 other onions. Until now the gophers hadn't bothered the onions but they have gotten 4-5 tomatoes. I go out and find a hole where a tomato had been. It hurts my heart. Just in case I have taken several good size suckers off the larger tomato plants and set them in potting soil and hope they will root pretty quick. Of course they will be late but if I get one tomato from each plant it will be all right as far as I'm concerned. So everyone has their problems.

I hate gophers. I hate the way they just pull plants down. It hurts my heart too. Luckily, our cats catch and kill gophers quickly, maybe because the gophers leave obvious mounds. Catching voles is harder, but our little orange 2-year-old cat named Pumpkin gets at least one vole a day. Pumpkin is a gardener's dream.

Okiedawn,

I once had a cat like that and she kept the gophers thinned out but I believe the coyotes caught her so now we are over run with them.

Oh, poor poor kitty. I hate coyotes (and bobcats and foxes) with a passion. I am so overprotective of our cats that it probably makes them crazy, but most of our cats are old and live well into their teens because they aren't allowed to stay out after dark and must be inside some building (house, barn, whatever) before the sun goes down.

It has been a long time since we've had a cat just up and disappear at a time of day that made me think a coyote probably got it. He was a gorgeous Maine Coon Cat named Fluffy and he acted antsy that day that he disappeared. I wish I'd never let him go outside that day.

The other day when a coyote was in our front yard, the cats put themselves up on the porch, except for Pumpkin (who hid somewhere wet because he was soaking wet when I found him and brought him in) and Tiny Baby, who got up on the roof of our two-story house. It took me a long time to talk Tiny Baby down off the roof of the house.

One year when we were having cougar issues and also had some bobcats showing up in the yard, Yellow Cat, who had roamed as a wild feral cat for over a decade before adopting us and coming to live here, got up on the porch roof at 2 a.m. and sat outside our bedroom window screaming. I had to go into our spare bedroom and open the window and remove the screen to bring him into the house because he wouldn't get down off the roof. I suspect either a bobcat or coyote was in the yard and Yellow Cat knew he needed help to get away from it. He did it again on another occasion but I was able to get him to jump to a nearby tree that time so I could bring him in....maybe because the bobcat was up on the roof. It is still amazing to me that Yellow Cat has survived so many wildlife encounters in his lifetime.

We still have Yellow Cat and he is quite old now---I think he is in his late teens because I remember him roaming around the neighborhood around 1999 or 2000 and he already was a full-grown cat then. He no longer roams around but just spends his retirement years sleeping in the sunshine on the porch or patio in winter and in the shade in summer.

Thankfully we have a young one like Pumpkin who enjoys the hunt because the old ones are many years beyond that point. Without a cat that likes to hunt, a family in a rural to semirural area can just become overrun with rodents.

We also have a cat named Ranger who likes to hunt rabbits. She doesn't kill them any more (I guess old age is creeping up on her), but she catches them and plays with them. Then, when she's tired of them, she lets them go. She also lets them go if she sees me coming because she knows I don't like for her to tease the wild things.

My onions are probably a month away from being "finished" I've used a few already for green onions and used the little bulb too. But...for the full sized ones they're about a month away (I think. According to the planting instructions/info booklet). One thing I don't remember reading about is this: The bulbs are starting to show nicely. Will the sun scorch them? Should I throw some dirt on them. They never got mulched. Should I throw mulch on them?

They should be planted closely enough that their foliage shades the bulbs if you used standard onion spacing. I've never had the sun scorch them under normal growing conditions. You can mulch them if you want (grass clippings in a 1" layer would protect the bulbs just fine), but don't throw more dirt over them. The dirt would have the same effect as planting them too deeply in the first place and might keep them from bulbing up properly. The number one reason that people do not get good sized bulbs is because they plant too deeply (although, I also think it happens because maybe they plant the wrong daylength type for their area) so adding dirt could backfire.

It always is amazing to me to watch those bulbs pop up more and more out of the ground as the bulbs enlarge, and that is normal behavior for bulbing onions. Sometimes, by the time you're ready to harvest, your onions are practically sitting on top of the ground already and you're not having to tug very hard to get the rest of the plant roots out of the ground.

Now, if something were to go horribly wrong with the plant foliage, like if it were to get hit by a fungal disease and suddenly shrivel and dry before the bulbs are mature, then losing the shade of the foliage might lead to scorching of the bulbs, but I have only seen this happen once or twice in several decades of gardening.