Overwintering alliums 2016: garlic and onions

When I clear the next bed it will be time to plant the overwintering onions. I choose to plant my onions in the autumn for two reasons; the first is that I like having the beds filled overwinter. It’s nicer than having a bare garden to look at. The second is that they are harvestable about a month earlier in the summer, which means their bed is available for replanting a month earlier, and that works for me.

Last year I ordered my overwintering alliums from T&M. For the onions I ordered ‘Electric’, a red variety that I’d grown before. It wasn’t what arrived, they’d substituted another red variety (I’ll have to check the label to remember which one!). They grew really well, and we’ve had some big onions this year. I left some of them to dry in the shed, where they got too hot and rotted, but most of them made it safely into the kitchen.

Rather than having them hanging around (we don’t have much space), I’m processing them in batches into the freezer. I chop one or two, lay them in a single layer on a baking tray and freeze them for a couple of hours and then slide them off into freezer bags. You end up with free-flowing chopped onions you can cook as normal. They do lose a bit of their crunch this way, but I prefer my onions soft, and frozen onions are great for throwing into the slow cooker when I put it on in the morning.

The problem with these onions (and I seem to remember the same problem in the past with homegrown onions) is that they are evil. They are really strong, I can’t cut more than two without tears streaming down my face! Ryan has offered to finish the job with a face mask on; I’m not sure that will help. There’s a suggestion that refrigeration does help, so the onions are currently waiting in the fridge.

So