“You will never win
the kohl rabi class. Why? Because you need a set of 5 not 4 you knob head”
I think you’ll agree, quite remarkable and admirable bravery
shown there by someone who really should know better, obviously forgetting
about the power of blog at my fingertips!!!
Now, moving on, we all need to know our limitations in life,
whatever the situation. For instance, when I go out on the piss with my mates I
carry a couple of photos in my wallet to let me know when my limit has been
reached. This is the first one;
However, sometimes I may have gone too far so in that case I
have to refer to this one;
The same is true with me and quality onions. Due to a mixture
of not having the right equipment and having much better things to do during
the cold Winter months (watching footy, watching beach volleyball, watching
paint dry and wanking) I don’t grow large onions from seed under lights,
instead buying them in from a supplier such as Medwyn’s. This saves time,
energy and electricity whilst giving someone else the problem of nurturing the
plants. Medwyn needs to be kept busy at his advanced age anyway. I ordered 10
plants which arrived mail order during April and were potted on and kept in the
warmth of my conservatory until they were ready to go into the tunnel. Even
then I couldn’t plant them into the tunnel border as my soil is totally
infested with white rot, and as I’ve discovered many times in the past this disease
can devastate your crop in days. Instead I had to grow them to harvest in large
12” diameter pots, a bottomless one on top of another for a really deep root
run, the growing media being a mixture of sterilised soil, M3 and vermiculite,
and it has been successful in the past where I’ve managed to get onions to over
3lbs which is plenty heavy enough for me.
The length of the roots is a sight to
behold when they’re emptied out. The internet is full of growers using
something called an air pot which I have no personal experience of, basically a
large plastic pot full of holes all round the sides. The idea is the root gets
‘air pruned’ when it emerges. I have absolutely no idea why you would want to
air prune your roots or what advantage such a practice brings to the party, but
a lot of growers are currently swearing by them.
However, I wasn’t about to experiment with something I
didn’t understand in my last season of showing so stuck to my double pot
system, using a metal ring supported with canes to keep the foliage upright.
This promotes good form on the eventual harvested bulbs. These onions will need
to be lifted by early August to have them ripened in time for the shows I do in
September so I have started putting a cloth tape around them daily, and making
a note of the measurements. At the moment they are all between 13 and 14 ½”,
and my aim is to try and get them as close to 18 ½” as I can. They should then
weigh approx. 1 ½ kg and I’m hoping to get an entry of a set of FIVE
in a class at the National for the 1-1.5kg onions. At the moment they are
expanding by ¼” per day, so I need to make a judgement call on a size when I
think they may be all be running out of steam. It may be for example that I
have to settle on 18” rather than 18 ½”, if I think they won’t all make it. The
idea is to harvest one at your optimum size (there’s always one that seems to
be ahead of the rest) and then harvest the others when they reach the same
size, which can take a couple of weeks. They are all roughly the same shape so
I should have decent uniformity I’m hoping.
My onions for the 250g class Tasco are also all starting to
swell and will need to be harvested at the magic size of 83mm diameter, at
which point each bulb should be bang on 250g once prepped for show, depending
on the shape profile.
I have an old cardboard template which I have used for a
number of years and which serves me perfectly well for this purpose. These
plants are planted in the tunnel border and are having to take their chances
with the white rot, as there are just too many to mess about growing them all
in pots. For the past 3 years I have used a product called Basamid on the soil
during mid-Spring which has depleted the white rot but I still suffer a few
losses. I have lost 3 bulbs so far and expect more will follow, but hopefully
it won’t be the 40-50% of previous seasons. Last year I lost about 15%. The
only possible problem I may have is that we’re going away as a family for a
week in a couple of weeks and I think most of the bulbs will need harvesting
during that week, so I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. I may have
to give my neighbours young son a crash course in onion measuring for some
financial recompense.
In the meantime, not all growers are quite as busy as I am,
preferring instead to lounge around like drunken layabouts drinking cheap west
country beer when they should be tending their crops. I do hope he didn’t use
all that contaminated water on his tomatoes? And any serious grower would have
all that useless lawn turned over to veg surely?
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