On Thursday morning I went into the pantry to put the big bowls that had held the squash away, and I couldn’t stand the mess a minute more. So I started hauling out all the produce stored in there.
Small garden June 2021
The first I worked on was the shallots. The crop had been extremely poor this year. I had not kept the shallots, far left back, weeded and the competition with the weeds was too much.
These are my seed shallots I saved from 2019. Compare them to the bowl in the first photo, on the right. That’s all the shallots I got this year that might be seed. They are very small.
These were the shallots I had to eat last year, 2020. Compare them to the bowl on the left, top photo. The bowls in the top photo are my smallest ones, about 6” dia. This one is one of the medium ones, 10” – 12” dia.
The shallots had been planted on time last fall, fed properly, and planted where they had sufficient sun. They had been mulched, but the mulch had been eaten away by the worms and I never got to replace it until July. That severe stressor made all the difference.
Next I moved onto the bowl of onions. This is my entire harvest for storage for the year. These were the same onions, Cortland that I always grow. But they had a lot of stressors. First I had to buy the seedlings. They had been planted in those tiny black 6 packs. They had never been thinned. And it took me forever to get the garden cleared out so I could plant this year. So they were late going in.
I had enough onions to do my spaghetti sauce, etc. but not enough for a year.
These are the Cortlands I stored in 2018 after finishing the canning. I always grow my own seedlings but could not this year due to no infrastructure.
These are the Walla Walla Sweets I grow each year. This was 2014.
The Wallas this year had the same stressors as the Cortlands and none of them got bigger than 2½”. I had none for the freezer or to dehydrate.
As you can see it’s very important to reduce all stressors on seedlings throughout the growing season, if you want to have highly nutritious, healthy plants for harvest.
Stressors include:
Poor starting medium
Too cold or too hot
Too much water or not enough
Not enough space to grow, either in a starting pot or the garden
Not enough light or too much
Seeds planted too deep or not deep enough
Not fed properly
Unbalanced soil
Lack of soil biology due to tilling
Lack of sufficient mulch if required
Poor seed quality
Competition from weeds or other plants that are too close
And the above will cause unhealthy plants that then have the stressors of:
Pests
Diseases
Fungal infections
Inability to utilize nutrients to produce good fruiting
I got the onions cleaned up and put them back in the pantry to finish curing. I will have to store them in bags, as there are no tops to braid to hang. I prefer to hang onions as it keeps them from being under pressure in a bag. They will go down in the old root cellar when ready.