Time To Plant My Japanese Onions.

Yep folks it's that time of year again.  Time to plant my Japanese or Winter onion sets.  I have grown these for about the last twenty five years.   

They originate in Japan and are really tough growers no matter what the Autumn,  Winter and Spring throws at them.  You just plant them like you plant your onion sets in Spring.  Japs are ready to harvest around June.  We start eating them in late Spring.

My Japs crop were pretty disappointing this year.  I think it was the very wet and windy Winter, just for a change.  That's gardening or growing things for you: one kicks forwards, one kick backwards.   Yes I know you can by "Orgasmic/Organic" onions from Lidl but it's not the same.  Is it?

Besides.  Imagine being a fly on the ceiling at Northsider Towers on a merry evening:  The electric fish tank we call television is blaring and flashing in the corner, Mrs Northsider  is busy knitting (scarves for Christmas presents at the moment) and yours truly is sat with my "Japs" cutting the stalks off so the birds don't  get a kick out of pulling them out of the ground with their beaks.  Don't  we know how to have a good time?  

So today I am going to harvest the last of the tomatoes from "Portugal" my plastic three hooped polytunnel friend and plant some "Japs" in a fish box where the Tom's lived.   I am also going to grow some outside and see which does the best.  Have any you keen gardeners/soil slaves ever transplanted onions like you can do with Leeks which are Alliums after all? Perhaps I just throw them outside in the fish boxes when the old currant bun (Sun) comes to visit next Spring?

Japs enjoying the Good Life.  Overwintering in "Portugal" the polytunnel.   It's  a good way of growing  onions and other vegetables especially if you use new compost and soil and helps alleviate diseases like "white onion" rot which Fish seems to have on last night's Gardener's World.  

When I had my allotments in Blighty I met an allotment holder who grew his cabbages in old paint tubs with holes drilled in the bottom and filled with compost.  He had inherited Clubroot or " Finger and Toe" disease.  It sounds like a second division goalkeeper coming to the end of his career and using the term for letting so many goals in!😊

I will be singing "Radar Love" by Golden Earring to them!