Water Troughs--Not Just for Water!

Healthy Harvesters Don & Pat W. have found livestock water troughs a good solution for raised bed gardening.

If you look closely in the middle of the photo you can see their very FIRST asparagus spear coming up -- it is from the crowns they got from Jim R. who recently divided his bed and gave away his surplus.


This photo shows their onions & radishes.

Don used fencing material that was left over from when they built their chain link fence to form a climbing structure so they can plant cucumbers, sweet potatoes, etc. Recycling feels so good! We'll look for some more photos as the garden grows!

Another item of interest -- Don is the proud owner of a worm farm. Pat promises to get some pictures of it later to share with everyone. Worms are a good way to quickly compost your garden scraps (chickens and fishermen like them too!) So we'll stay tuned for a story to come on the worms! Maybe even a worm seminar!

Do you have photos and/or a garden story to share? Be sure to let us know!

How Many Onions?

To answer Paula's question from a previous post, we always order two bunches of 5 dozen onion set plants and usually harvest well over 100 onions each year. That works out to about two a week, or one onion per person per week. We tend to use onions (and garlic!) in almost everything we cook, so if you don't then you'll want to order fewer onions and remember not to accept dinner invitations from us.

All of them fit in the new bed in the photo. Although some of them get as big as the ones in the store, most of them are a little smaller--about the size of lemons--and some even smaller. Onions are heavy feeders and being organic we don't use commercial fertilizers, so this may account for their smaller size. As our beds get more enriched each passing year with our chicken manure compost I expect we will start seeing bigger onions.

Perhaps another Healthy Harvester would like to split a collection with you?

One of the advantages of buying three colors of onions--besides color and flavor--is how long they keep. Because of their sugar content sweet onions don't keep long before they start going mushy or sprouting. Most of the short day collections have a sweet yellow, so after harvest we try to use these up first. The reds tend to keep the longest.

You'll want to make sure your onion bed is well-drained because they don't like wet feet. We lost all our onion and garlic plants two summers ago when it never stopped raining and they were in raised beds.

Another thing to consider is you can always plant some closer together and use them sooner as "green onions". Generally, we plant them 4" apart and let them grow to the size they choose. You will know when it's time to harvest because the tops turn yellow and fall over.

Literature--obviously outdated-- once recommended you store them in pantyhose with knots tied between them, hung in a dark place. I don't know about you, but I don't have much opportunity to wear pantyhose these days. If I still have any they are probably tied in knots in the dark recesses of my closet, sans onions.

Last year we purchased tulle (bridal netting) for 35 cents a yard at a fabric store and wrapped them in their own little bridal gowns secured with tiny rubber bands from the little girls' hair section of the grocery store and stacked them in an old wire milk basket. This year we discovered Dixondale conveniently sells netting tubes at a reasonable price and opted for them instead. I'll report next year on how well they worked.

Raised Beds and Onions

At our Saturday meeting (which Rick will soon be blogging about) the subject of raised beds came up. There are as many ways of raising vegetables as there are gardeners, all of them being a matter of choice.

One reason to choose raised beds is better drainage and less bending (which we appreciate the older we get!) Paula P. sent a photo of her raised bed, saying it's been a while since it looked this good and that she's interested in getting started with chickens (& their manure) and drip irrigation.


Looks like Paula used cedar to build her boxes. (Comment Paula?) Cedar is a good choice because it's fairly rot resistant. For those of you considering raised beds, you don't want to use any type of treated lumber because of the chemicals, or railroad ties because of the creosote. These substances leach out and would be harmful, and contrary to the idea of eating healthy!

Since our garden is pretty large we've opted for using scrap pine we get from damaged pallets and helping others tear down old stuff. It won't last as long as cedar, but we can't complain about the cost. We are the ultimate scavengers. At first, we feared our garden would look like a hobo encampment, but don't you think Rick has done a wonderful job putting it all together? Using free stuff takes longer than working with dimensional lumber, mostly because of the disassembling first required, but you are doing the Earth a big favor when you recycle materials otherwise destined for the landfill.


To neaten things up a bit, and to provide a nice sitting edge from which to do our seeding and weeding, we do add new pine boards on top. We will seal these with something like Thompson's water seal. You can see the strap ties holding some of the sections together. This is the onion bed Rick built the last two days and we planted this morning. You can see the drip irrigation spigot poking up in the right hand side of the bed. Drip irrigation soaker lines will be run off the multi-head spigot.

January is time to plant onion sets. Last year we bought our onions from Brown's Omaha Onions located in east Texas and had a very good crop. Although the adorable Brown daughters are so cute, this year we opted to purchase our onions closer to home, from Dixondale Farms in Carrizo Springs. They claim to be the oldest onion plant grower in the nation, starting their family business in 1913. We have been pleased with both of them.

If you are going to order onion sets, one thing you need to know is you will need to order "short day" plants. (It seems to me our days are very long, but apparently this is not so). This is fairly well explained on both their websites. We always order the short day mix of yellow-red-white because we like variety.

Do any of you have something to add about raised beds or onions? If so, please comment!