Unnatural urges

Doesn't it feel great now that we're getting a couple of minutes or so of extra daylight per day? The first daffs are poking their little noses through the soil and several trees are breaking into blossom in the town, very early I know and a frost will soon knock it back but no worries....Spring will soon be here although it will be some while before the Northern chutney ferrets can start doing their naked group sundances where they lather each other in lard and see who can spear the most black puddings on their love cabers.




This weekend I will probably sow my Vento onions for the under 250g class at Malvern, although i'm in no rush and if it's a task that gets left to the end of January then no problem. I had huge problems with the germination of Vento last season thanks to those maddening seed casings that the suppliers coated them in. After several weeks they still hadn't come through and I since found out that they were germination inhibitors that allowed farmers to sow early and that the seeds wouldn't germinate until temperatures in the field were right. Great for farmers but no friggin good for me and, as it tuned out, dozens of other growers up and down the country who were experiencing similar problems. Well, Medwyn listened to us and insisted to his suppliers that in future all his seeds wouldn't have this coating on so I felt duty bound to buy a packet from him which duly arrived with my other orders last week. I'm going to try sowing the seeds in slightly larger modules with some seed compost and added vermiculite for drainage. Onions like an open, 'gritty' media and the traditional practice is to prick out at the crook stage. However, some current thinking is to leave the seedlings until they have the first proper pair of leaves and are more robust and likely to survive transplanting. Doing so at the 'crook' stage risks damaging the delicate root and is easily done with my fat fingers.



I am also hoping to get hold of some onion sets 'Setton', a variety which I have grown for a couple of years now. They are quite unusual for sets in that I find they grow pretty uniform in shape (similar to Vento), ripen nicely and are pretty easy to match up. Every other onion set i've ever grown has thrown up a multitude of different shapes and skin tones, and matching up nigh on impossible for anything other than village showing. However, as with all my onions this year i'm going to have to grow them in pots throughout, as I can never grow in the ground again because my soil is rife with white rot. I finally decided last year to give up growing them in the ground as the failure rate was proving to be just too high, despite regular treatments with the highly toxic Basamid.



I really want to stage a set of 250g onions as part of the Millennium Class at Malvern, a class that was introduced in 2000 to give ordinary growers like myself a chance, as none of the crops supposedly required any special heat or set up to grow them. This isn't strictly true, as the top growers have made great strides growing potatoes in polybags, stump carrots in deep sand beds, and even coring holes for globe beetroot i'm told, so if you want to compete you do still need to go to great lengths of preparation. David Thornton won it in the first year but hasn't got a look-in since so he obviously got lucky. The class calls for 5 dishes namely, 250g onions, tomatoes, globe beet, potatoes and 250g onions, 4 matching specimens of each. Mark Hall has won this class at the last 2 Nationals so he'll be going for his hat-trick at Malvern but it's always a competitive class attracting many entries. Here is Mark's winning entry from Llangollen in 2011.

The bottom photo shows Ron MacFarlane's winning 'Toughball' onions in the 250g class. Note how beautifully ripened they are and how uniform the shape is, with the veining adding an attractive pattern to the skins. 250g onions only command 15 points under NVS judging rules, the same as cabbages, marrows and globe beet. I reckon they deserve more as getting this sort of quality takes more than just growing them to the required size.

p.s. has anyone got an antidote to an itchy beard? My face feels like a pair of bollocks that have been across a desert without a change of Y-fronts.