Onions – Beautiful Chaos

Finally the wetter was improving again and I could make some time for the garden. It is high time to plant the seed potatoes, onion sets and garlic. And while we are at it we are going to sow some faster cultures in between the rows.

I started with the seed potatoes. Our children helped me and we planted 21 kg of seed potatoes. We planted following varieties: Aromata, Ballerina, Folva, Sava, Laura & Belana. Most of these we already hat and we liked them. We had already covered most beds with straw, so first I took the straw down from the bed, laid out the seed potatoes on there place and put them in the ground. Then I divided the straw back on the beds. We filled 11 beds with the seed potatoes.

Then we filled 4 beds with onion sets. With 3 beds I sowed 3 rows of carrots in between the rows of onion sets. I also put a layer of straw on these beds, but a thinner layer. I am not sure if it is a good idea to put straw over the sown carrots, but we will see if they come up. I planted following onion sets: Rosanna, Karmen, Alpha, Sturon, Stuttgarter Riesen & Snowball. I sowed following carrots: Robila, Treenetaler, Rote Riesen 2, Milan & Vitella.

Unfortunately I could throw away half of my garlic because they had mold. My storage possibility was not so good for the garlic. So I could not even fill 2 beds with garlic. With one bed I sowed 2 rows of red beets in between the rows of garlic. With the other bed I sowed half rows with the following: Turnip, leafy greens, winter posteline and Asian salad mix. For the garlic I had following varieties: Edenrose, Flavor, Cledor. Here I also put a thinner layer of straw to cover the bed.

The children had a lot of fun helping and where eager to also fill there own beds. Next week the sowing goes on with other vegetables.

And we have made ourselves a lot of work in the garden this year.

We have no useable soil on our property, so we have to work with raised beds and hillbeds in order to grow our vegetables.

This means a lot of work before we can even start with gardening.

As you can see on the picture we also mulch all our beds. Our location is ratter warm and dry, so this way of gardening is beneficial to keep the moisture in the soil.

Unfortunately this year was no good for the tomatoes. We only harvested a few handfuls of so many tomatoplants we had started from seed in the winter.

On the other hand we had an abundance of zucchini, even a few broccoli en a bunch of onions.

**Broccoli, Zucchini, Zucchinisoup and elderberry jelly**

A few red cabbages have been turned into sauerkraut and kimchi. And I hope I find the time to harvest and process the rest of the cabbage before the caterpillars eat them all.

The paprika was getting late to ripe due to the cold wetter now and then. So we had to harvest them green otherwise the paprika went bad before turning red completely.

Since we do not like the taste of green paprika I am fermenting and pickling them. Also the chilies are getting fermented.

**Paprika and Chilli pickled and fermenting**

We are so lucky to have a great potato yield. We had a number of different varieties. One did better as the other. Our favorite is the potato “Aromata” which tastes very good and gave us the best yield with a lot of very big potatoes.