I finally got around to taking in all the onions harvested from the bed planted with purchased seedlings. It is hard for me to believe these all grew from such tiny seedlings. I think planting onions seedlings is one of the most backbreaking jobs in the garden, and each time I’m stooped over a bed trying my best to evenly space them into straight rows, I wish I would have made the beds more narrow (or grown longer arms!).

I didn’t take a picture right after planting, as I thought the bed looked so darn pitiful. I waited until new growth was clearly sprouting. I was so happy to see green shooting up! It is always such a leap of faith to put things in the ground and expect them to grow, and then it feels like a miracle to be savored when you see it finally start to take off.

Here is the bed on May 13 (notice how small the cucumbers are!):

And five weeks later, so much green:

I had to decide how to store my onions this year. Two years ago I left them in baskets. They did okay. Last year I put them in panty-hose legs, knotting between each onion. That method took a lot of pantyhose (which isn’t something I have a lot of, although I did relish using them for a gardening task instead of using them to torture my legs). It also took a lot of space to hang them in the hose.

This year I decided to braid onions. This was made more difficult as I had already cut off much of the tops on some of them. In any case, I was eager to experiment, and assembled my supplies:

Onion Braiding Supplies

onions

twine

scissors

one cold Mexican beer with a lime wedge

I braided my onions on the porch, even though it was scorching hot, because it is such a messy job.

I read the instructions on this site, but still wasn’t really sure what I was doing.  Let’s blame it on the heat.  In any case, I quickly got confused. Of course, that didn’t stop me.

The picture on the left shows my first attempt.

The second picture shows one of my later attempts, when I simply started to “free-style”. It occurred to me that I wasn’t actually braiding the onions, so I thought I would give that a try and see what happened. This was a lot faster and easier on my hands (I didn’t need to keep tying and knotting, except at the very end, to tie the top off).

The final picture shows a small braid of the tiny onions that never grew very much, hanging under my kitchen work table.

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