Great Storage Onions Batman!

This past growing season, I was able to get some onion sets from Snowfire Gardens, owned by my parents.  My mom Florene ordered the onion sets, called "Candy" from a local garden club, the North Root Gardners.  We had an unusualy high amount of rain this past fall, to the point that the Mat Su Valley had extreme flooding and was declared a disaster area.  Reed and I had planted the onion sets carefully in a triple row in the (fortunately) more sandy part of the garden.  They grew, albeit slowly, into a medium sized onion that we harvested in the pouring rain.  I was not feeling confident that they would be a good storage onion, as we had a few that were lost to drowning in the garden, and the air had been so humid that we were having trouble drying the herbs even!

I keep all the mesh bags that apples, onions and other veggies sometimes come in and I use them for all sorts of things - including storing onions!  So I grabbed a mesh bag and put the onions, dirt and all in the mesh bag and hung them in my garage stairwell to hopefully dry.

This is right at the top of our stairwell going down to the unheated garage.  I had actually forgotten they were there until we ran out of onions the other night and while we were being cranky about it Reed remembered the stored onions.  So we got out a couple of them and.....

 

Low and behold they were beautiful under the layer of dirt and one layer of paper skin!

 

Keeping in mind that these have stored from September through mid February, I am looking at a new favorite at the top of the onion list! 

 

Flavor, texture and color are great even after having been stored for six months, and we still have a few left to use!  You can get "Candy" onions from a variety of sources online, or maybe from your local garden club.  Resource pages say they are a 6" onion and they store for three months, but maybe because of all the rain we had they didnt get that big for me but they definitely stored longer than that!  I will certainly have more than one row this year, and Reed plans to add them to his garden as well!

 

Stay tuned for a future blog on upcycling those mesh bags!