My laugh of the day! That is so me with some certain weird stuff.

I now feel a little better about all the labels I've lost.

Kim, I've had tiny wisps do that some years, but not every year. I wish I could figure out why it happens only sometime and not all the time. I'm happy when the onions are happy too. I am not going to try to figure out why having happy onions makes you and I so happy. Maybe it is a zen thing....the onions are okay so all is right with the world.

Nancy, Weird stuff is my middle name. I am not joking when I say that every day at our place is either a day at the circus or a day at the zoo. Today it was the circus.

I dug potatoes. At one point I dug one that had a big rotten spot at one end. I decided to toss it over the fence, figuring a skunk or possum or something would come across it overnight and feast on the 75% of the potato that was not rotten. The fence is 8' tall. I flung that potato really high to clear that fence. It cleared the fence. It went up into a tree. It landed on a tiny, thin limb and stopped....and is sitting there still. There is no way I could have made a potato land, perfectly balanced, on a thin, wispy willow limb if I tried...not if I was doing it to win a bet, not if I had practiced. Not. Not. Not. Never going to happen. Only it did happen. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry because it was such a ridiculous thing to have happen.

Amy, I am pretty sure the wind carries mine away. Or, sometimes it is Pumpkin. He'll pull one out of the ground and run around with it in his mouth like it is a mouse. I have no idea why. We have plenty of voles and field mice if he wants to play with an actual rodent. He thinks everything is a game. I'm sure I'll find the missing plant label sometime....likely buried in the soil....in a year or two.

It is silly how relieved I am that the onions are behaving properly. Nothing else in my garden is behaving properly. I had spider mites. They went away. That never happens. Spider mites never just go away, but they did. There's only been 1 solitary squash bug, now dead. That is rare. There were no Colorado Potato Beetles at all. There's very few grasshoppers, but lots of praying mantids. Stink bugs? They're everywhere and they are hard to kill. I have stinkbug damage on tomatoes now like I'd normally see in July or August. That means the tomato season will be short because at some point they do so much damage that the fruit gets too pathetic to eat, though I doubt we'll reach that point in the next 2 or 3 weeks. Maybe we'll reach it a month from now. As long as we get enough to eat our fill and do the canning, I don't care if the tomato season ends early and if we then have to wait for fall to have tomatoes again. It is hot and dry and not nearly rainy enough, so keeping tomato plants happy all summer would be hard. Having stink bugs so early just makes it easy, at some point, to yank out most of the tomato plants after the canning is done and then to just move on.

So, even though I brought in a ton of tomatoes today, most are not fully ripe and will take a few more days. Otherwise I'd be making salsa. Usually I have tomatoes, garlic and onions, but we're waiting on green bell peppers or jalapenos or both. This year I have the onions, bell peppers, garlic and jalapeno peppers, but we're waiting on tomatoes. It isn't that the tomatoes are late---it is that everything else is just early. I remember one year we had our first big jalapeno pepper harvest on June 11 or so, and I was thrilled to pieces. It is hard to have large amounts of jalapenos that early. This year our first big jalapeno harvest was in mid-May. This just adds to the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling of this entire year.

Dawn

Rotten potato tossed story set me on a 5-minute laughing spree. AND laughing is one of my favorite things!

And is good for us too Nancy. I do not laugh enough and have been told I am to serious have fun and I try but alas dirt is not that funny. So I come here. Usually someone tells something funny. Like potatoes in trees. I do stuff like that but I take pictures then I laugh at my own self too.

Dawn - I'm glad that you are not crazy!! I have to make a detailed map of my garden and stick to it or I won't remember which is what.

Do the short day onions all have about the same storage potential? Or do you just use the short day onions first in salsa and for fresh eating and not really concern yourself with storage? I ask because I know that the intermediate day onions that I am growing this year (Candy, Superstar, Red Candy, Pontiac) vary quite a bit in their storage potential so I make sure I know which rows are which and label the bundles while curing so I know what to use up first. It's not much of a problem unless I grow multiple types of onions that look similar but don't store the same.

I'm glad y'all enjoyed the potato in the tree story. It did make me laugh out loud, especially when I realized it was staying there and not coming down.

Lone Jack, Well, you never know. I might be crazy. There are some days when I'm out there in the garden hurrying to beat whatever incoming weather is arriving that I might appear demented to a person casually driving by who doesn't garden and therefore doesn't appreciate the art of putting up deer netting hastily or hail protection or frost blankets for freeze protection. They probably mutter about "that crazy woman" in the garden as they drive by.

It is okay if they think I am crazy. Sometimes I might have contributed to that perception without meaning to. We used to have guineas and they like to roam--following the grasshoppers wherever the grasshoppers take them. One day, I was working in the garden wearing (this is an important part of the story) overalls and a straw hat. I wasn't dressed for being out in public, but I didn't expect to leave the garden so it didn't matter. The guineas went bonkers and started running up the road. It was about the time that kids would be getting out of school, so I needed to retrieve them and get them out of the road. I rushed out of the garden, rake in hand, and took off after them. I never looked back. I had to follow them almost a quarter mile before I caught up with them......By the time I caught up with the guineas, rake in hand and looking like nothing so much as a garden scarecrow come to life, and I turned them around to herd them home, I found that the cats had followed me and the dogs had followed the cats. So, up the road we headed, me pushing the guineas to keep them moving (they are easily distracted), swinging the rake in the air to keep them out of the road, etc. The dogs and cats trailed along behind. And, then, in a moment I'll never be allowed to forget, here came all the cars and trucks up the road...parents picking up their kids at school and bringing them home. The normal people (that would have been, in this case, everyone but me) all slowed down, waved, smiled, honked their horns, hollered hello, and laughed at the spectacle of a scarecrow woman herding a big flock of guineas, dogs and cats up the road. Apparently it was a very entertaining sight. We no longer have guineas and I don't miss them as much as I thought I would. They can be very embarassing birds. lol. After that incident, any chance I had of being considered normal just flew right out the window.

Short day onions, for the most part, all are supersweet onions so they have limited storage time---2 months for some, 3 to 4 months for others if they are cured really well and stored in ideal conditions. Red Creole is the shortday exception offered by Dixondale. It is a more pungent onion, not a sweet one, and if I harvest them in June, they'll usually store until January or February and occasionally later. Most of my short day types, and a good portion of the intermediate daylength types, do end up in salsa but we also use them pretty much every day while cooking. I try to use them up in order...starting with the one with the lowest average storage period and working my way up sequentially from there.

With the intermediate daylength onions, I use them in a lot of salsa too, and when making traditional bread and butter pickles from scratch, which includes lots of onions. I think Tim likes the onions in the B&B pickles as much as he likes the cucumbers. The red onions usually get chopped up and used either in red onion relish or in Habanero Gold Jelly, aka confetti jelly. The use of red onions adds to the confetti-like appearance of the chopped peppers in the jelly.

For me, the big revelation has been how well a few long-day types will do here even as far south as I am. For a long time, I've grown Copra for storage onions as they last almost forever. Then, starting around 2012 or 2013 (whenever DF introduced them) I began growing Red River and Highlander, both of which do really well here, mature by July and store for many months. They tend to make pretty large onions too, which is just a bonus. I don't grow for size, like for bragging rights, but I do like when the onions get big and I feel like we are getting the maximum harvest possible in relation to the amount of space used.

This is the first year in a long time that I've grown all three in the same year---Copra, Highlander and Red River. I wanted to see how they do in the same year in the same conditions because it isn't fair to compare them to one another based on their performance in different years with different weather conditions. So far, Highlander and Red River are much larger and Red River is bulbing up already, but that doesn't mean Copra might not win in the end.....if it matures last, I suspect it also will last the longest in dry storage.

The saddest day of the year here is when we use up the last stored onion before the next crop is harvested. My goal always is to have enough onions that we don't run out. Sometimes I succeed at that and sometimes I don't. In the years when we have far more than we can use up fresh, I chop them and freeze them in zip locks in cooking quantities of 1/2 cup, 1 cup, etc. I can put a lot of smaller zip locks for cooking inside a gallon sized freezer zip lock bag.

One year (I might have overplanted a bit) we had so many onions that I was in crisis mode and chopped and froze onions endlessly. Actually, I think it was partly Dixondale's fault---I believe I ordered 9 bundles and then each bundle was triple packed, so we had onions everywhere because I didn't want to waste them. Anyhow, I froze three years' worth of onions and the most important lesson learned from that was to double bag them or else the deep freeze will stink to high heaven of onions for years and years afterwards.

I care a great deal about onion storage and have experimented with many methods over the years. I want a real root cellar--not that we have the time, energy or money to engage in building one, but maybe after Tim retires we'll find the time and means to build one. When we remodeled the kitchen last year, we took out the door to the walk-in pantry so we could have more cabinets and countertops there. Then we made a new door for the pantry that comes out into the breakfast room/living room area. That's not even the most important part---we put in a nice floor to ceiling pantry cabinet in the kitchen with all the pull-out drawers, and it holds so much that now my walk-in pantry beneath the staircase can be dedicated solely to the storage of onions, potatoes, winter squash and the like, and also home-canned foods. So, that might be as close as I ever get to having a root cellar, but it beats having onions and potatoes stashed under the beds in the spare bedrooms and in the closets and in the tornado shelter, etc. I'm excited that the onions and potatoes can be lined up on shelves in one central location and used in order. Having them in one place means it will be easy to keep an eye on which ones are getting close to sprouting and need to be used up.

Of the three long-day types that I grow here, Copra still stores the longest, Highlander stores slightly longer than Red River (but not necessarily much longer) and Red River comes in last...but stores longer than the other types I grow except for Red Creole.

I never would have imagined there ever would be a long daylenth type I could grow this far south, but Copra made me realize I could. Then, years later, along came Red River and Highlander. It makes me wonder what other new varieties we'll see over the next 10 years.

Dawn

Too late but just thought to ask

Are you sure those weren't walking onions lol I laughed about this all by myself in the garden.

No wonder the neighbors watch me. I am a one woman show laughing, chasing male dogs away from my girls, wiping my brow with the hem of my shirt ooopsie, laughing to myself. And singing loudly. Ha walking onions

Dang it, lost my post to internet limbo.

Some critter will be standing outside Dawn's garden tonight staring wistfully beyond the fence, the wind will blow and a potato will konk it on he head. Will it eat it? Will it climb the tree looking for more? Will it run into the woods squealing "the sky is falling"? Meanwhile, the muppet onions will fall over laughing and there will be more onions to pull tomorrow.

I went to DF to find the short day sampler that I planted. Texas 1015Y Super Sweet (yellow), Texas Early White, and Red Creole. I thought the 1015s were white. They aren't doing well. Most of the reds aren't very big. But some of the whites are softball sized. Interesting. Also, all 3 are open pollinated!

DH has been known to throw labels away without even thinking about it because he's in clean up mode. I found a commercial label for Super Sioux in the onion bed today. I bought the SS in 2014. It was planted in the 4x4 bed that came before ALL the newer 8x4 beds and the onion bed was new in 2016. Figure THAT one out!

Oh Kim, you and I are birds of a feather. My least favorite thing about the front garden is that everyone driving by can see me.....so there is no privacy, and that's okay unless maybe fire ants are climbing up your leg inside your pants and your're hysterically trying to strip off those pants while fleeing from the garden....not that I've ever done such a thing. Well, not more than once or twice. I think I must entertain the neighbors but they're too polite to comment on my antics.

Amy, That is too funny.

Who knows where labels go. I remember reading the book series "The Borrowers" when I was a kid, and they lived beneath the floorboard of the house and used all those things that mysteriously disappear. I loved those books. Sometimes I think I have The Borrowers in my garden, borrowing and using things that surely I have not lost or misplaced. This is why I have 5 trowels in the garden at all times. When I misplace one, I grab another. In the autumn, when I find them all while doing garden cleanup, suddenly I'm trowel-rich again.

I too have had old things turn up in brand new raised beds. I blame it on compost and mulch accumulating such items, getting moved around the garden and then popping up wherever the mulch or compost are being used. Sometimes when I find an old label, it is a walk down memory lane to try to remember what year it was that I last grew that particular variety.

Today, just to show that the onions have a sense of humor, all the remaining onions in the Short Day bed (about half of it) are standing straight and tall with no soft necks, but the reds in the Intermediate Day bed suddenly are getting soft necks. I looked at them and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I believe the onions get together and plot at night. I can hear them whispering...."yes, let's do that tomorrow,it will freak her out". I believe I am growing diabolical onions this year.

Some day I'm gonna mix up all the onion varieties on purpose and have fun trying to figure out what they are as they mature. I also have a Red River onion with a soft neck.....my nightmare of having all the onions suddenly mature at the same time is threatening to come true....and it is going to be hard to have a chicken-free place to cure hundreds of onions all at the same time.

I want to know why I was able to cure onions on tables on the patio with no problem from the chickens for 15 years, and then last year, the chickens suddenly decided the onions were for their dining pleasure. To be fair, the chickens only want the greens and don't peck the bulbs, but I want the greens left alone so they can dry down and the onions can cure properly. Maybe I could put the tables in the fenced chicken run and cure them there because the chickens spend their day everywhere except inside the chicken run.

Dawn

You convince me more every year, Dawn, that chickens are more work than I want.....but I still am planning on them! But I ain't sharin' my onions.....

Are you experiencing a good onion year? I saw on FB that Kim is already taking them to market and I've got a lot of short days maturing too,

And guess what else we're harvesting (not to hijack!!!) .....SAND PLUMS!!! Well, the chickasaw tree kind of ones that we have. No joke. I've lived here 11 years and they've never matured this early. Not complaining because I'm out of jelly!

Hi Paula, We're having a great onion year. About half the short days are harvested and curing but the other half acts as though they are not interested in flopping over at all. Meanwhile, the necks on the intermediate types are just beginning to soften, allowing the foliage to flop over. The three long day varieties stopped new growth long ago at the 12 to 15 leaf range. I suspect they cannot make more leaves than that, so they are just sitting there waiting for the right daylength or whatever to occur that will let them finish up. They are starting to bulb. I think that we'll have either 7 or 8 of our 9 varieties harvested before the end of June. The ninth one, Copra, tends to run a bit later than the rest. Since that one is for prolonged storage, I'm not in any hurry to harvest them anyway.

I've noticed from various FB photos that lots of folks far north of me are harvesting onions already, and to my eye, a lot of those don't look like they even reached the softneck stage before being harvested. Some of them have had such thick necks that they resemble leeks! That sort of drives me crazy, but I don't say anything because they are not asking a question like "did I harvest my onions too early?" or "would my onions have been twice as large as they are now if I had waited until the proper time to harvest them?" I just bite my tongue. When someone does ask about when to harvest, I do tell them about the soft neck stage and proper curing for the longest storage possible. I'm not sure I understand the urge to harvest things far too early, other than perhaps they are eager to put a succession crop in that same space if they have limited gardening space. Well, I understand when farmers or market growers harvest earlier to get the onions to market because early onions are money in the bank, but I don't understand when home gardeners do it.

I planted too many onions as always, but we use so many in cooking and canning that I suspect we'll use up every one of them.

Because we never got really cold after the onions were planted, they grew like gangbusters and most have 12-15 leaves, so we're going to get nicely sized onions even though our rainfall this year has been only about 60% of average.

I'm glad your plums are ready. Ours froze while in bloom or shortly after bloom so there won't be any new plum jelly this year, but I made two years' worth last year so we won't run out any time soon.

Chickens do complicate one's life, and I love them anyway and always will have them. They are so adorable. Our chickens get used to me coming out of the house with the compost bucket in my hand (especially when canning is producing tons of waste material) and follow me right to the pile, happily clucking away as they dig and scratch through whatever yummy stuff I just tossed on the pile. Sometimes in the afternoons when I'm in the garden working, the chickens stand outside the fence as close to me as they can get and work through the grass looking for bugs. I think they are hoping I'll toss them a tasty caterpillar or something every now and then (and I do). Since chickens are not garden-friendly, they are not allowed in the garden when there's crops growing, but they loiter around its fence constantly. If I walk up to the house and forget to close the gate, the garden is full of chickens when I come back. Apparently they watch very carefully for such opportunities to infiltrate the fenced compound. Luckily, they aren't in there long enough to do any damage---mostly they just dig and scratch in the mulched pathways, searching for bugs.

We also have one chicken who loves canned cat food. She'll hear me call the cats to come indoors, which I often do while beating on a cat food can with a spoon...because nothing makes the cats come in quickly more than the prospect of being fed. That chicken comes running with the cats and tries to come inside with them every day. Sometimes I'll take her a spoonful of canned catfood just because she loves it so, but I'm not letting her come into the house.

Dawn

Dawn - I love the guinea story! If that had happened these days I'm sure one of your neighbors would have made a video of it to share with the world.

This year I am trying Pontiac onions started from Johnny's seeds for long storage. They are not doing very well compared to the DF plants. Some of them are decent size with around 10 leaves but others are no bigger than bunching onions with just a few leaves. I don't think I did anything wrong growing them as they are in the same bed as the DF onions and some Red Cipolinni onions I also started from seed are doing well. Had I known that my local seed store that carries Dixondale onions every year was going to offer Copra for the first time I would have just grown those. I can get Candy to store until about January with good curing and then it is either frozen onions or store bought until late June when I can steal one from the garden. I don't mind buying onions this time of year because the sweet Vidalia onions are in the stores.

And Dawn don't look now but rain is heading your direction!

Yay Paula. Wish I could say I'll come right over to help u pick wink wink.

Lone Jack, I know! I'm so happy no one caught video of this hysterically embarassing moment. I was even laughing at myself as the neighbors drove by because I could tell from their giggling, pointing, waving and general merriment that I was, at least, putting a smile on everyone's face. No matter how bad a day that might have been having up to that point, seeing their foolish neighbor out herding a crazy assortment of animals made them forget whatever had gone on before. That should have earned me some brownie points. I've also noticed that when someone is out looking for a missing animal, they always stop and ask if I've seen it. I guess they figure a woman who can herd guineas up the road in what passes for 'rush hour' here on our rural road probably would notice if runaway goats, kids, cows, pigs, piglets, dogs or cats wander by, and no one spends more time outdoors than I do.

Would you believe the rain is finally, but not quite, almost here. At least we finally have thunder. On the radar it looks like we've been having rain for a while, but all we've had is low clouds and some sort of misty garbage that doesn't quite make it to the ground. To our west and southwest, the rain storms have trained over the same area all day long since before sunrise in some cases, so some areas have had 5-6" of rain or more and have or have had flood advisories and such, while we've had nothing measurable. I do expect it will arrive here soon unless the radar is just totally messed up. There's no way it can avoid us.

I love Dixondale onions. If someone here carried them, I'd buy them but all we see, even in small local farm stores, is Bonnie Plants, which appear to be taking over the world. When I was a kid, you could buy Dixondale Farms onions in the feed stores and nurseries, back when there were local nurseries more oriented to edible gardening than to ornamental. Or, at least, they had a great selection of edibles, and not just from one supplier. Nowadays, it mostly is BP everywhere you go. When I see locally grown flower, herb of veggie transplants from a few of the small growers in north TX, I always make a point of buying some of them because I want to support the smaller, local growers. It is the same if I see Red Dirt Plants anywhere (they are based in Guthrie OK and Atwood's carries them. Ordering from Dixondale at least ensures I'll get exactly the varieties I want and they'll arrive fresh and still green. To me, that makes them worth the price (which seems outrageous per bundle, but quality costs and so does shipping).

I don't mind buying onions at this time of year either since the Vidalias are in the stores (and, when we buy them, we likely are buying Dixondale because they ship millions of onions to the official Vidalia growing areas every year). However, I do believe I'm through buying onions at all for the next 8 or 10 months or even longer.

Dawn

Dixon dale had a post about their melons being in the dfw metro if anyone is down that way.

Wow. I don't know that we'll be down there, but if we are, I'll look for them. I know they do raise crops year-round to pay the bills. You also can order their onions (for eating, lol, not planting) directly from them at certain times of the year.

I went and looked at their FB post, Kim, and the grocery chain that has them is WinCo, which happens to be across the road from the Sam's Club in Denton. I'm pretty sure we'll go to Sam's on either Saturday or Sunday. I'll let you know if I find them there.

Yes I couldn't remember winco. I went there once in Denton. Everyone raves about it but I found it to be higher than Sam's and Kroger.

I did know they sold onions but had no idea they had those beautiful melons.

I loaded a 6 gallon waterborne full of onions for market. It's all I got pulled and trimmed. Ran out of days and light. Need a headlamp.