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Perennial Onion Harvest

Perrenial Onions

These are mostly Amish Onions, with a few Egyptian Walking Onions mixed in.

I’ve posted before about perennial onions, and now in my garden I have Amish, Egyptian Walking and Fleener topsetting onions. The Fleener onions aren’t doing well right now, and struggling along.

I’ve been growing perennial onions for a few years now, and I really like them. Basically you can eat any part of the plant you want to, at any time. The onions I have now are all topsetting onions, and leading up to the summer solstice will send up a scape similar to a garlic scape and form topsets that can be eaten or replanted for more plants. Sometimes the plants also form root divisions. You can leave the plants in the ground, and they will continue to produce new topsets year after year. Anytime you want, you can dig up the whole plant and eat the root which is an onion with a unique and special taste, but then the plant will be gone.

The plants are very disease resistant, so it’s not necessary to rotate them and they can be left in the same spot year after year. They also tolerate transplanting very well, and can be dug up and moved almost anytime. They are carriers of some of the same diseases that are a problem for other members of the Allium family like garlic and onions, so where you grow them has to be taken into account when planning crop rotations for these other plants.

Honestly, if you don’t like eating onion greens, this kind of onion is probably not for you. The greens are the best part, and really have a nice taste. The greens are also available early in the spring, when there aren’t often other sources of onion available. The roots and topset, while edible, are not really spectacular.

I am still trying to find the best way to serve the greens. The flavor is wonderful, but delicate and easily overwhelmed by other food flavors. They disintegrate quickly when cooking. So far, I have enjoyed them most in salads (as long as you don’t have a strong tasting dressing), as well as a garnish in many places.

Except for the handful that went into dinner, the onion greens you saw in the picture above, after going through my dehydrator, became this:

Perrenial Onion

They turned into something similar to dehydrated chives.

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Holland’s Three Most Important Exports

According to police in the Netherlands, the three most popular export products are:

  1. Cucumbers
  2. Tomatoes
  3. Marijuana

Dutch marijuana is reportedly flooding international markets, and displacing products from other countries such as Morocco, Lebanon and Pakistan.

For decades now the sale, use and possession of small amounts of marijuana has been allowed in the Netherlands, and in recent years the growing of marijuana has also been increasingly allowed. For personal consumption, the growing of five plants per adult living in the same household is currently permitted. There has also been a degree of laxness when it came to enforcing the law in larger growing operations.

The situation has now changed, and the police are currently closing down about 15 growing operations per day.

It’s Different

The marijuana that’s being produced in the Netherlands now is different from anything that’s ever existed before. I know we’ve all heard this before, the warnings that marijuana is getting stronger and becoming less safe, but it’s really important to understand this time is different.

For a number of years now, a lot of attention has been paid to breeding new cannabis plant varieties in the Netherlands. A lot of money has gone into it, and big name plant science laboratories have become involved. The approach has been the same as with other food crops, trying to develop marketable varieties.

Most of the new super varieties are F1 hybrids, and they are patented!

The emphasis has been on strength, because to have a patented product that is the strongest means you will control the market. After all, if you are a marijuana consumer (or wholesaler or distributor) offered a choice between a stronger or weaker product, the natural thing to do is choose the stronger one.

The Problems

Besides the underlying commercial greed that goes into this sort of plant research, the most immediate problem with current varieties seems to be the balance between two chemicals THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (Cannabidiol).

The strength of marijuana is normally measured by it’s THC content, and this appears to be the focus of the research on the new varieties. Unfortunately, this appears to be at the expense of the CBD content, which is lower in the new varieties.

The THC is what makes you ‘high’. The CBD on the other hand makes you more relaxed, reduces paranoia, and most users report a higher CBD content makes the high more pleasant.

The true importance of a good balance between THC and CBD is only recently coming to light.

The local media has been full of stories recently of dramatic increases in the levels of mental illness and psychosis associated with the use of these new super varieties. Police have associated an increase in crime as well.

Discussions have been taking place in both the Netherlands and the UK as to if the laws need to be changed in order to protect users from these new plant varieties. As is usual with this type of situation, a clear link is not being made with the new commercial varieties, but rather with marijuana in general.

It seems very unlikely that any government is prepared to only ban the commercial varieties of a particular product, while continuing to allow the non-commercial variant. It seems unlikely any government will take the necessary steps to provide the necessary quality control in this situation.

If you are a consumer, you should be looking for other sources besides Holland!

Perhaps if you are a consumer of Dutch cucumbers or tomatoes you should also be looking for other sources, but I think this is a topic for another post…

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Important Information for People Growing Ulluco

I know there are a few readers of this blog growing Ulluco now.

Frank just left a very informative comment on the previous post. There’s more information in this comment than I’ve been able to find on the entire Internet to date.

So far I have several plants that are surviving, but I can’t say much more than that. Since I was expecting to hill them up like potatoes, I planted them in trenches. This means the ground is a little wetter than the rest of the garden, the plants are a little shaded by the sides of the trench (I dug them east-west), and so are staying a little cooler in this hot spell we are having.

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Garden May 2008

In an earlier post I showed a drawing of my community garden, together with some ideas of what I would grow and where. Here’s a little bit of an update.

The apple trees are in bloom:

Apple Tree Blossom

Apple Tree Blossom

The pears have already begun setting fruit, and while late frosts killed most of the plum blossoms, a few have managed to set fruit as well.

I just transplanted corn plants started indoors into bed #4:

Corn Plant

Here is a yacón plant in bed #3, next to weed suppressing plastic:

Yacón

I started the Ulluco indoors, and recently transplanted it to bed #3. It’s an amazingly fragile plant, and it’s still suffering a bit from the shock of being transplanted. To anyone else considering starting it indoors, be sure to start with a large pot as it gets root bound very quickly.

Ulluco

I planted a few Ulluco tubers early, with my potatoes, and that seems to have been a mistake. In spite of a layer of straw to protect against some late frosts, they don’t seem to have survived. Together with these transplants, I have also planted my last few tubers, so we’ll see how they do.

My potatoes are starting to poke through the ground:

Potato

The garlic in beds #1 and #2 is getting huge! I’ve already started harvesting spring garlic, yum!


I’ve also been harvesting rhubarb, left behind be the previous gardener. It’s amazing how good home grown rhubarb tastes compared with what you buy in the store. I wonder what they do to store bought rhubarb that makes it taste so bad!

Still to be planted out are some cucumbers and squash to go with the corn in bed #4 and some white Alpine Strawberries to go in the back of bed #3.

The tomatoes are doing well in the greenhouse, but there are too many weeds to take a picture right now. I have taken out a part of the patio and the red currant bed, and have been building some raised beds in their place. I’ll take some pictures of this when it’s a little more finished. In these beds, I’ve already planted celeriac (celery root), Crosne (I’ll post more about this later), some peppers and the asparagus plants. I plant to put swiss chard, beets and beans in other beds in this spot.

I’ve planted some tomatillos next to the garlic in bed #1.

My Belgian friend Lieven also gave me a number of soft fruit plants, and these have gone in on the back side of bed #1 as well as the empty space between the red currant and cold frame in the garden sketch.

I recently planted tubers or seeds of ground nuts, Oca, Mashua and Salsify in bed #3. The Jerusalem Artichoke I planted in the fall in the back of bed #3 has also started coming up.

I planted some peas in the back of bed #4, but they are not doing well. I’m still trying to understand what went wrong there, and perhaps I’ll post some more about that later.

I still have a number of seeds to plant, including those given to me by others I need to say more about. I also have more to say about where a number of the plants I’ve already mentioned came from. I’ll do this in other posts.

The weeds are driving me crazy! In the last few years I was growing on heavy clay, and the size of the garden meant I mostly gave up on the weeds where they couldn’t be mulched. This year I am trying to keep them much more under control, but it’s a lot of work.

The previous gardener let the weeds get out of hand, and many have become very established and there are a lot of seeds in the ground. He also build an extensive network of paths with paving stones, and this has generated a huge problem with the weeds and used a lot of space better made available for plants. I have been slowly taking up these stones, and using them to build the raised beds. I have to do this a little at a time because they are so heavy, and as a result the garden is in a bit of a state of disarray right now.