There was a letter in Garden News last week from a lady asking how she should tie and display her onions. The picture at the top (one I found on the internet) illustrates what I consider to be a poorly presented pair of onions. The shame is they had great potential to be an excellent exhibit but the necks have been cut far too close to the 'shoulder' giving them an awkward appearance. They are also far too 'green' and should have been lifted earlier so that the skins had time to ripen.
The bottom pic shows one of my onions tied with raffia and cut a quarter of an inch or so past the top of the raffia. Some exhibitors bend the tops over and tie raffia over this double thickness of stalk but I don't think that ever looks very neat. As you can see the nut brown colour is more appealing although this onion has been lifted since early August and is now starting to wrinkle and show its age. I just pulled it out of our veg basket to illustrate this posting.
Onions should be exhibited on specially made stands with rings to support the bases and black cloth thrown over the lot to hide the often ugly contraptions. Alternatively, trays of DRY sand can be used....if you use wet sand the onions may start to root or rot can be induced into the base. Again the pair at the top doesn't quite work on the shallow silver tray somehow......although having said that it did win.....the rest of the entries cannot have been up to much.
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