After a week away, this morning I ventured out into the vegetable garden. The flower garden in front of the house was looking great, but I wasn’t sure what I’d find out back.
It has rained and rained and rained this week. There were two sunny days, the most perfect of perfect summer days when there’s a slight breeze and bright sun and temperatures that start cool and rise naturally into the low 80s by noon. I enjoyed them at my conference, and I believe the vegetables enjoyed them, too. However, we need more of that– more sun, more heat. Less rain. This morning I went out in a light drizzle to check the progress of things.
The strangest thing that has happened in the garden so far is that all my shallots and the few onions in raised beds bolted. That is, they sent up flowers.
Garlic does this– providing the delicious garlic scapes I use in stir fries and salad dressings, but onions should not. A little research on the internet told me about this phenomenon.
Onions are a two-year plant. They start as seeds the first year, and if you don’t harvest them, they will come back the second year and go to seed. They don’t produce flowers (seeds) the first year.
In places with short seasons, like Minnesota, many people buy seed onions, basically giving them a head start, so that they’re ready to harvest by mid-summer.
With the warm weather in March, I put in the shallots pretty early. Then we had a hard frost and some freezing weather in April. It didn’t kill any plants, but it seems to have profoundly confused the shallots. They thought that it was winter, and so they went into their “second” year in late April when it got warm again. Thus, the flowering.
Flowering doesn’t affect the quality or flavor of the onions, although they will stop growing when they flower. (I tried cutting off the flowers, hoping to get a little more growth, but it doesn’t work.)
The bolting does make them unacceptable for storing. I put a bunch of them on the porch, where the slatted floor is usually a great place to dry onions. Possibly the rain and dampness inhibited this process, but now that I’ve done my research, and seeing how they’re kind of just sitting there with green leaves, I’m bringing them indoors and trimming them and putting them in the fridge. Usually onions are harvested after the leaves completely die and the top of the plants fall over, but in this case the plants were alive– in full flower– when I pulled them. I’ll use them in the next month or so, share them, and hope for better luck with the 100 white onions I’ve got growing out with the potato plants, none of which have shown signs of flowering yet.