The Busy Woman's Garden Book

by Ida D. Bennett

Another practice, very satisfactory for the home garden, consists in planting in early spring the old onions placed in storage for winter use; usually these will have begun to grow by March and are useless for cooking, but if pulled apart and each shoot planted out in good garden soil they will start at once into growth and in a few weeks' time produce a delicious green onion, sweet and of the utmost tenderness. I have found it a good thing to spade the flower beds intended for the growing of annuals and bedding plants early in the season and plant the onions in these, thus saving room in the garden and getting a greater use of the flower beds.

Unlike many vegetables the onion can be grown year after year on the same ground, providing it is well fertilized each year with barnyard manure, so that the humus content of the soil is not depleted. Clean tilth is essential, so that as little hand work as possible may be required for onions tops are exceedingly tender and injury to them checks the growth of the bulbs. The garden overalls adopted by many women for working is a distinct advantage in the onion bed. For onion sets sow seed in drills early in spring; gather the sets when ripe and store in a dry place till spring; slight freezing will not injure them but they must be protected from thawing and freezing.

But for winter onions of notable size and quality the New Onion Culture should be adopted:—This consists in sowing the seed in the hotbed in early spring and transplanting to the open ground when the weather is suitable. Set the tiny plants an inch apart in the rows, thin when big enough to use as green onions, removing every other one leaving them standing two inches apart, thin again to stand four inches apart and grow on until fall. If seed of Prizetaker or Ailsa Craig are used onions quite the equal of the fancy Spanish onions sold in the fruit stores will be produced. The soil must be more than ordinarily rich; besides the spring dressing given the garden before ploughing the space selected for the onions should have well-rotted manure trenched in at the rate of a wheelbarrow load to every square yard: in trenching lay back a spade's depth of soil across the end of the onion bed; fill this space with manure, trench a second row, throwing the soil on top of the manure, fill the fresh trench with manure and continue till the whole bed has been worked over. Rake the bed until the surface is perfectly fine and smooth and sow the seeds in drills fifteen inches apart or set the plants as directed.

Onions are occasionally attacked by root lice which if not at once exterminated will quickly destroy the plants; the lice work on the roots of the onion and the first evidence of their presence is a sickly yellowing of the tops; if an onion is pulled up and examined the presence of the tiny white lice will at once be evident: the remedy is salt and the method of applying is to open a shallow trench beside the rows and scatter salt quite plentifully along it, filling in the earth again; one application will exterminate the lice. Attacks of root lice are by no means common, but the fact that they do occur and are very deadly should make one watchful for the first sign of discoloration in the tops.

When the onion tops show signs of ripening they should be broken down; this is sometimes done by rolling a barrel over them. A light home-made roller may be easily constructed by taking a length of nine inch stove pipe, fitting a piece of wood in each end with a hole through the center to admit a bar of wood or iron which should be attached at the ends to a handle adjusted so as to allow the cylinder to roll; this being light can be rolled over the bed, leveling two or more rows at a time according to the length of the cylinder; it can be quickly constructed of waste material about the place and any piece of wood of suitable length—a couple of lathes, even, will answer, will do for handles. It is a good idea when it is found necessary to employ help in cultivating the garden to have a few little jobs like this on hand in case rain interferes with the work; in this way neither the time of the help nor the money of the employer is wasted and I have found that it gives far better satisfaction to the help if there is something of the kind for him to do so that he need not lose his day's or forenoon's work. Sharpening tools is another job that it pays to remember in the odd moments. A memorandum of things that can be done when it rains, tacked up in a conspicuous place in the work room, toolhouse or barn is a very useful reminder and avoids an awkward delay while one tries to think of something to do.

If possible onions should be dug on a warm, bright day and allowed to lie on the ground until dry and clean; they should then be stored in a dry, airy loft or on a scaffolding. On the hay in a barn is a good place for onions and they can be left there until freezing weather, for the shorter time they are in a warm house the better they will keep. If the temperature drops suddenly a little hay can be thrown over them. Slight freezing does not injure onions, but repeated freezing and thawing does. An upstairs room is better for storing than a cellar unless the latter is unusually dry and not too warm. Onions will, usually, keep in perfect condition until the middle of February or the first of March, when they will begin to grow and should be sorted out, and the sound ones given a cool, dry place and sold or used as quickly as possible and the remainder saved for planting in the open ground.

PARSLEY

So universally used for garnishing and for flavoring soups and salads is of very slow germination and for that reason is more successfully grown when started in hotbeds and transplanted into the open ground in May. The ancients held that parsley should never be sown as they claimed that the seed had to make a journey to Hades and remain six weeks; when sown in the open ground it seems to bear out that theory, so slow is its appearance above ground. In the hotbed it requires about three weeks. England, too, has its superstition of the parsley, believing like the ancients, that it should be planted, not sown, that it must make the long journey to the infernal regions and return and that there the devil takes his tithe of it, for proof of which they point to the fact that a small part only of the seed comes up. A better explanation would be found, I think, in the quality of the seed, the home grown seed coming up quite as well as other seed, the boughten seed sometimes proving unsatisfactory.