That's always a sad day Dutch. I'm down to 8 garlic bulbs and 3 Candy onions. It's still 3 months or so before the Vidalia onions start to show up in the stores here so I guess it's whatever the grocery stores carry until then.

I used my last shallot over the weekend, and the potatoes are about gone, too. Can anyone use a pumpkin? How about two?

My potato crop was poor last summer. They have been gone for quite some time. In the meantime I have come to rely on Russian banana fingerlings from my local CUB. I use enough of the whole little potatoes for my own meals and have no left overs to go towaste. Same for peppers. I used the Sweet Bananas as long as I had them, and then went over to the Mini-bells from the store. Once again no part of a pepper left over to go to waste, if I don't eat it up right away.

Learning to cook for oneself without overdoing the portion size has been an ordeal, until I finally settled on using the smaller sized varieties. I do like the larger sized garlic cloves like from Music though!

Got tired of having to revert back to store-bought garlic, so this year we cleaned our "excess" Siberian Red and Chinese red, ran them through the food processor then double bagged and froze them. Now we can just break a chunk off the end of the frozen flat "bars" formed in the baggies and keep using our own stuff. Works fine. Pretty sure we have enough frozen to get to next June's harvest...

One of the good things about losing a crop and having to buy what you need is that you find out what you really like.

Were I in a more normal situation with adequate freezer space, I would be using far more frozen goods. As it is however, I am forced to rely more on canned and fresh, supplemented by a modest amount of refrigeration. The frozen option is a very good one however whenever possible. Less salt than canned for sure, although there are some very nice canned no salt added options anymore for those of us with salt restrictions.

OTOH I am not so down on store produce as some; 50 former years of tobacco use and now some half dozen heart medications seem to have sorta blunted my taste buds. :-( The current variety of both organic and commercial produce and other foodstuffs is huge beyond what I would have even begun to imagine as a boy.

One thing we found out freezing fresh caught fish was that a vacuum sealer adds to storage life in frozen foods almost infinitely. It also seems to seal in (or out) strong flavors. Most of the bags are resealable too; so one can go back into frozen stocks again and again, reusing the same bag, especially if one takes the time to freeze things into single use units before vacuum sealing (it becomes a two step process but in the end allows for much better management of stored frozen foods as well as cutting the juice problem when doing the final sealing).

'Taint much freezer space for two or three pounds of garlic! Dutch, ya need a bigger freezer!

I need to try the mincing and freezing next year as horster suggests. I definitely dehydrated enough in 2016 to last us a couple years or more of making garlic powder. I have a small food processor that I use for making horseradish and I imagine it would work fine for garlic as well. I failed to make any pickled garlic this year either and I had to toss a couple jars that were left from 2015 because the cloves were browning in the jar and I didn't want to risk it. I have about 230 garlic growing this year so I should have plenty to freeze.

Horster - how is the Thermadrone doing? Did you get much top growth in the fall after planting it in early November?

What an interesting thread. Last year the onion root maggots
were worse than usual, so I had lots of onions and shallots that would not
keep. I tried several preservation methods, but so far my favorites have been

1. Fully cooked caramelized onions frozen in
   vac-sealed “tubes.” You could snip off the end and squeeze out as much as you
   needed for sandwiches, burgers, etc. Notice
   past tense, these went fast!
2. A complicated “shallot confiture” I found on the
   web. I have made a lot of pickles, but none compare to these whole shallots
   pickled in a well-spiced sweet brine.

Shallot confiture recipe

I never thought about freezing caramelized onions...that sounds like a great idea! Do you just nuke them for 1 minute or so to warm them up?

The shallot recipe does sound a little daunting. I am not currently planning to grow any shallots this year and if I do stick a few in somewhere it won't be very many. Last year most of my shallots bolted severely resulting in tiny bulbs.

One of the real nice things about vac sealing beyond the heavier bags used is that they can be resealed. With a little advanced prep one need not thaw the whole thing either.

What we do with crappies can probably be adapted to other sorts of single serving foods. Thanks to my older sister who developed this, we lay out the crappie fillets in layers on wax paper with a sheet of wax paper between inside gallon or large enough bags to initially freeze, or at least stiffen up so there is no juice. Then we pack the individual frozen fillets flat and vacuum seal them. We then don't have any juice problems in the initial vacuum sealing (so almost no need for clean up) and we can take out individual fillets and reseal and return the rest to the freezer with no loss of quality. Vacuum sealed frozen fish outlast any other freezer method you could ask for, coming out just like fresh after months in the freezer and with no freezer burn.

I expect that the heavier vacuum bags will hold allium flavors in better during their stay in the freezer, too. Since I live by myself, at times I will cook up multiple servings, divide them out and freeze the excess in single meal sized portions. Some ingredients that I like a little of like hot peppers (even relatively mild ones like the very large Anaheims) are just a bit too large to use in single serving sized meals without left over waste. My primary goal is single serving meals with nothing left over in the preparation; so I use things like fingerling potatoes, mini-bell peppers, etc. which leaves no partial fresh vegetables left. Most of my recipes are expandable as well, and I use a lot of fresh produce in the process.

On freezing the caramelized onions...With the vac bags that come in a roll, you can cut them into wide, skinny pieces and seal up the long sides. I made 8x3-inch bags for the caramelized onions, which held 3-4 "servings." With partially-used bags, I folded over the cut end, put on a clip, and put it back in the freezer. The bags were not thick, so it was easy to break off frozen pieces in different sizes.

That sounds like a good method bcomplx. I'll have to remember to give it a try this spring when the Vidalia onions hit the stores. I love caramelize onions on hamburgers and steaks but I don't often bother to make some because it takes too long to do them right.

Jack, bcomplex has a very good technique. My sister also uses it. She gets her rolls off the internet often at real sale prices. From what I have seen the brand of the vacuum rolls isn't as important as the quality of the sealer.

My late mother used to freeze her broccoli and cauliflower in bite sized pieces on those cookie sheets and back when the seed corn companies still gave out premiums like massive heavy plastic bags, she would bulk the whole works up in one and just take a whatever she needed right off the top and reseal the bag with a twistie, since the florets were all loose. Some of those bags lasted her for years.

FWIW a little known fact is that a great many garbage bags, especially those not scented, are actually food use quality, and can be used for bulk food storage even in the freezer. Some of them are really heavy duty, too, and can stand up to a full season of use and even then be washed and used over again.

If you are lucky enough to talk the local tropical fish shop out of some of their fish bags, those are also heavy enough to be real valuable for holding frozen foods. I used to sell them and they are heavy and well made. They have to be or the shops won't buy them. Not the used ones, but the new ones they buy by the case to use for their retail customers. IIRC you can also seal them but you will have to force as much air out as possible by hand, since they are not set up to vacuum.

LoneJack, it has been a weird fall in KS, as you know. The so-called Thermadrone (all two of them) came up with much thicker,stronger looking leaves than the others (Chinese Red, Bogatyr and Siberian Red). I really think that they are an elephant garlic, not Thermadrone, but we shall see.

The summer-like fall caused the Chinese Red to emerge 100% but after my late planting only a scattering (10-15?) of the others came up. The CR and others that did come up got very tip burned when the weather quickly dropped below zero in early December. We have had mostly 20's for lows since then. Now they are green at the base only and fried on the tips. Interestingly, I took another count two days ago and an additional 60 Bogatyr and Siberian Red have sprouted (no burn on them). Total planting last fall was 180 cloves. It will be interesting to see how the mix of late planting and scorching affects size next harvest.

My garlics come up in the fall some years, some years not. Usually it varies by variety, too. Most falls Music and Siberian make no showing until spring, but I have Asiatics that usually make some showing in the fall. This fall I planted real late, and nothing came up; so I should get all my growth in the spring this year. I simply don't worry about it anymore.

I was out in the garden yesterday digging up a few leeks and bunching onions that I had left out there. Surprisingly most of them were still pretty firm but a few had turned mushy. I also noticed that some of the garlic was already putting on new top growth. The soil in the beds was not frozen so I guess the garlic said what the heck!

It looks to be another early spring here in Missouri. Only a few lows below freezing in the 15 day forecast and 11 of the 15 days with highs in the 50s or even 60s. I'll have to start checking the garlic from time to time to make sure none of the new growth is getting impeded by the shredded leaf mulch. It's too early to pull off some the mulch yet though.

Dutch - I assume you started your onions by now. How are they doing? I gave mine their 3rd haircut on Tuesday and they will be do for another one this weekend. They are growing fast with the third true leaves coming on now. The Red Cipolinni have noticeably thicker leaves than the bunching onions or Pontiac and are less prone to flop over.

When do you separate and transplant your overwintered perennial onions up there? I assume that I should do it in early to mid march or so when I plant out the new onion starts.

I have not yet started my onions. It went from 40's Monday when I had to work to single digits Wednesday, and I got discouraged. Mea culpa. If your ground is already thawed are you planting radishes, carrots and lettuce outside yet? I did that last year when only the top two inches or so had thawed and I still got a great stand of all three, although it took a while. I have even heard of some flowers like larkspurs that you seed on top of snow and let that water the seed in as it melts.

The perennial onions planted in the fall are divided when planted and then left to grow out from there the next spring, although I will sometimes divide the tree onions, which tolerate it at any time of the year. Those multipliers that I store indoors over winter are divided and planted as early as I can get the beds prepared; they are not too fussy but one gets better size and bigger nests from planting as early as possible once the ground is thawed. Generally that would be about mid April, or perhaps a little earlier in early dry springs.

We do get dry spring times up here quite often. In fact we have a spring wild fire season across much of Minnesota, during which open burning is often prohibited. Farmers used to burn the bromegrass in their roadside ditches to get a good new growth in the spring. Bromegrass gets thatch bound and burning clears that away as well as fertilizing the deeper roots. One of my mother's cousins had one of those burns get away from him and that caught on one of the wooden beamed railroad bridges. That damn near cost him his farm.

Since most farmers have pulled their fences by now, the creeping crop lands have reduced quite a bit of the ditch easement. Every once in a while a county will force a farmer to re-survey the easement and move his crops back off it. In Iowa the original plat was for 4 acres a section (1 mile x 1 mile for a total of 640 acres - including the easement) devoted to roads and ditches. Where I grew up it was every mile on the mile the roads were a grid, and it more or less still is. Those country roads are all named "streets" now IIRC because the Post Office demanded it.

Those multipliers that I store indoors over winter are divided and planted as early as I can get the beds prepared

OK, maybe I screwed up then. I have Evergreen White bunching onions that were planted out as seedlings last March and grew well, I thinned them down to one every 6" or so. They went dormant in mid summer for a couple months and then started growing again in late August and started to divide shortly after into clumps of 4-5" and maybe 6-8 plants. I left them in the bed all winter. I thought I was supposed to do this and then divide them this spring and replant the individual plants just like I did with the new seedlings last year.

I haven't even thought about planting any radishes, carrots, or lettuce yet. I planted some radishes in late February last year but they grew really slow and I think the ones I seeded a couple weeks later actually rooted up earlier. I'm not planning any spring carrots this year but I have about 60 sq. ft. allocated for them in the fall. I still have a few left stored in damp sand in my garage and about 20 meals worth in the freezer. I won't be planting out any lettuce for at least 4 weeks. I start my lettuce indoors and plant out at 3 weeks so I might start some around mid Feb. and then some more in early March. I'm still getting more than we need from my indoor salad garden!

It may be an early spring but I'm sure we still at least have some teens left in our future.

I think you will be alright treating the bunching onions like you do tree onions, pretty much anytime the divisions have separated; they are also very tolerant. Some folks even divide garlic in the spring with some success, when they find a full bulb that got overlooked the previous summer and then has overwintered. The shoots from the individual cloves can be separated then, too. The alliums in general all transplant pretty easily. I don't generally divide my fall planted multipliers in the spring, but I suppose that wouldn't necessarily harm them provided they have already have distinct divisions. I don't normally get enough fall growth to get divisions then on my multipliers, but I do on the tree onions.

I normally have enough to do with other spring tasks and a very intense dose of fishing fever.

I even have trouble sometimes actually getting going this time of year... :-)

If your ground is already thawed now would be the perfect time to work your summer beds even if you are not yet planting, especially if you are going to add lime. That takes some time to circulate properly. I prefer beds that have settled some, but that isn't always possible here. Of that all depends on whether you have enough warmth to be comfortable. I prefer not to suffer doing the things I enjoy :-)

I need to get on separating the bunching onions ASAP. I think they are starting to grow again already!! My garlic is also growing quickly, over the weekend I loosened the leaf mulch and liberated a few that were having issues penetrating through the mulch. It is looking like another early spring here with only one night below freezing in the 15 day forecast and 10 days above 55.

Not so warm here in Minneapolis, but still well above normal. I also have some garlic starting to show; a turban (Xian) is ahead of most of the rest, also some other hardy alliums, including my sand leeks. The ground here is still frozen expect for the tops of the mounded garlic beds. Not much is up yet, only the tips of the green noses starting to poke out in places.

Peach flower buds are starting to show velvet already, too. That is way too early for them.