This was a good feeling. Bunch after bunch of onions ready for pulling. More than half had the tops laying down. 100 more sweet onions, and 200 long storage onions.
For reference, my handspan is just over 10 inches. The bunch at the top, and the one in my hand here, are sweet onions. They taste good enough to eat like an apple, but you have to use them right quick or they rot. Very little sulphuric acid, so no tears when cutting them up, but with such low acid, they also do not keep well. Got one of those cardboard grocery crates full of them.
The long storage onions run a bit smaller.
Top guys on these run about 10 ounces this year, with average maybe 2/3 that size. Still not bad. Between home and the Ness Farm I have 300 of these, so, for general eating, that will come to a bit under an onion a day for us, and since they are not in cooking every day, and we will be eating just sweet onions for the next 4 or 5 weeks when cooking with onions, they should last just fine.
My dwarf tomato project, which is apparently producing all yellow cherry tomatoes regardless of plant type, are ripening out there, and I picked a few dozen from the various plants. I am going to have to talk to some of my tomato breeder friends to see if this is worthwhile to keep pursuing since I crossed larger tomatoes hoping for a new dwarf of single rugose foliage, with strong upright stems but short. Bushing yellow cherry tomatoes was not what I was going for, and this is the F2 generation.
The Iroquois White Flour corn stood itself back up and looks fine now 5 days past the windstorm. If not for the curve in the lower parts of the stalks you would never know it had been laying flat last Sunday. That was another happy moment this evening.
These though, are part of an unhappy moment. This is the uneaten sides of the plants from the Wamneheza black colored cob planting.
There are quite a few areas where it seems obvious some fat assed masked bandits just sat themselves down and helped themselves to everything within reach.
Evidence of their corn orgy was all over two of the patches, being both of the Wamneheza grow outs, but far worse in the black seeded cob patch.
The popcorn has not really set ears yet, so it was unscathed entirely. The sweet corn, pink flour, and Iroquois white were also relatively left untouched, with just a few of the Iroquois white which were apparently broken and did not pick up finding themselves eaten.
As much as I would like to render the raccoons into crock pot meals, right now all I can do is hope that they do not return. Do not want to lose this stuff to them. I am not capable of sitting there all night waiting for noise with a spotlight and .22. No time. Too much other stuff going on. Funeral stuff with Patti’s family, work, kids, just a lot going on. I have time to harvest, but not to guard from thieves.
It was getting dark by the time I headed back home.
Once home I ferried half of the sweet onions to various neighbors who appreciate such things, and the rest went out on the deck. I did NOT leave the onions in plastic bags. They are spread out to cure and this photo was just to show what I brought home, along with the pile of Walla-Walla onions that I cured on the table in the middle of the picture. Those are now inside, the sweet onions in the crate are spread over that table, and all of the long storage onions are in various other places out there.
