|
e-book:
|
|
Ministry of Agriculture Allotment &
Garden Guide
|
|
Click image for
facsimile of
page 4 August 1945
Page:
1 /
2 / 3
/ 4
5 /
6 / 7 /
8
|
| |
|
ONIONS |
|
|
|
A little meat goes a long way—with
plenty of onions to flavour the dish. We shall need all the meat-stretching
flavour we can harvest, and now is the critical time in the life of the
spring-sown onion. On the care taken in lifting and ripening depends its
ability to keep well in storage.
First step is to bend the tops over and then leave for
about a fortnight while they shrivel. If you have some "bull-necks" which
refuse to be bent, use them up in the kitchen in the next few weeks.
To lift, loosen the bulbs by pushing a fork into the
soil well under them, and lever then up.
 |
|
Then lay the bulbs on their side with the under-surface and roots so placed
as to catch the full sun. Now they must be thoroughly dried before you take
them into the dry shed, spare bedroom or wherever you are going to store
them.
If the month is a "baker," the process should not take
long—just lay the bulbs on firm ground or on a path until the skins are
really dry. If the weather alternates between dry and wet, the onions much
be lifted off the soil and the most made of the sunny spells by sheltering
your onions on a home-made drying frame. Prop a piece of wire netting on
four corner pegs, spread the bulbs on it, then above them—about 3 in.
higher—prop a sheet of corrugated iron on four more pegs. The sun, when it
comes, beats on the iron and warms the onions beneath ; the air circulates
freely, and the crop ripens quickly and well.
 |
|
| |
|
Sow Onions |
|
|
|
See that the soil is firm, and sow fairly quickly. Use varieties of the
White Spanish type or those specially recommended for autumn sowing. In the
North, the first week in the month is the time ; the third week is early
enough down South. |
|
Some growers divide their sowings, saving some of the seed till late
December. They find that the December sowing produces fewer plants that run
to seed. But whenever you sow, keep weeds firmly in check. |
|
| |
|
Hold that moisture |
|
| |
|
About 300 years ago, a
scientist planted a willow shoot weighing 5 lb. in a barrel holding 200 lb.
of dry soil. for five years he gave it nothing but pure water. He finished
with a fine tree weighing over 169 lb. : and the soil had lost a trifling 2
oz., so he concluded that water was the "principle of vegetation."
Other scientists have since found it isn't quite as
simple as that, but none of them has grown a plant without water. In fact it
takes anything up to 1,000 lb. of water to produce a single pound of plant
substance.
Plants are just as thirsty in August as human beings
are, though they are unable to trot into the kitchen or down the road. But
they do have roots able to draw on the available moisture in the soil. It's
up to us to see that the moisture gets to the roots and not into the warm
air. |
|
Much can be done by timely hoeing to stop the
soil cracking when it has been beaten down by heavy rains or watering. But a
better way to keep the roots or peas, runner beans and tomatoes supplied
with moisture is to spread a layer of half-rotted manure with plenty of
straw in it, well-rotted compost material, or even decayed lawn-mowings,
between the rows and around the plants. This is a mulch, but it is next to
useless if you put it on already bone dry soil. Seize the moment after a
fall of rain, or if the rain fails, give the ground a good soaking.
See that the mulch is open in texture : heavy
impenetrable stuff keeps the air from the soil and may even tend to sour it.
Watch your lawn-mowings specially. Mulching also helps to keep down the
weeds.
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
next |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
