When Good Onions Go Bad – Garden Failure and Flowers
Every year I fail in the garden. No really. I FAIL. Repeatedly. There is always something that rots or gets eaten by bugs or dies a tortured death and keels over for good. Last year it was tomatoes. This year it is onions. Every day of the drought this summer I watered the onions and yet the water was not the rainwater the onions craved and eventually they fell flat like a criminal getting shot. I finally dug them all out – tiny babies that they were – and saved what I could for my favorite omelets.
Failure is not the end of the world, however, it is a learning experience. At first, I was worried about the bare nakedity (yep – that’s a word I invented) of the giant space left in the garden. Imagine what my neighbors might think if they saw one square inch of my front lawn vegetable garden without a vegetable in it? Oh, the horror. ::gasp::
Fortunately, the weather was kind to the garden in mid-August. There were several heavy downpours that helped the Luscious Berry Blend Lantana at the front of the onion row fill in and cover up the onion-less space nicely. There you see the flowers with cabbages and beets growing as strong as can be on either side. Fall planting is just around the corner, so a great solution to my failure would be a fall planting later in the season. For now, I’m thinking positive; I mulched the bare ground and have been enjoying the gorgeous Lantana’s. Have you failed in your garden? What solutions have you come up with?
*Note – Because the FTC requires it, I am noting that the onions were supplied by Bonnie Plants and the Lantana was supplied by Proven Winners. All opinions are my own.
Did you plant onion sets, Shawna? And if so didja plant them when the moon was in the 3rd or 4th quarter, in Libra ? No? Well there you have it 🙂 As a kid growing up on a farm in rural Alabama my job was planting and caring for the family veggie garden. Onions took a lot of preparation because of our heavy clay soil. I had to prepare an area a foot deep and till in a lot of manure and compost to make the soil well drained. Onions don’t like to be watered everyday-they need to dry out in between. Deep watering a few times a week is ideal. Better luck next year.
Thanks for the great advice!
Shawna
Try and try again Shawna. I have had a whole blight of green fly on my tomatoes this year despite watching them like a hawk with sprays on hand.
Hi Shawna, just found your nifty blog. Lots of cool ideas! BTW, those onions aren’t failures…it’s no failure if you get something useful out of the deal. Tiny onions are just as tasty as their larger siblings. The things I’ve learned about growing onions are don’t plant them too deeply, don’t water them too much and accept what they give you.