for the love of onions WORDS LYNDA HALLINAN | IMAGES VICKI RAVLICH-HORAN
I have a friend—let's call her Deanna—who doesn't eat onions. While she isn't actually allergic, her tastebuds have an aversion to all alliums. As well as finding onions odiferous, she loathes leeks, shuns spring onions, shudders over shallots and holds chives in contempt. Indeed, the only allium allowed in her kitchen is garlic, though she's as iffy as it is whiffy. “Garlic is okay,” she shrugs, “but I'm not bothered. I don't crave it.” To be honest, if Deanna wasn't also a gardening goddess, creative cupcake baker and my youngest son's bestie's mum, I'd question the foundations of our friendship, for who can live without onions? Not me. I dice, slice and mince onions into almost every savoury dish I make, from cheese scones to muffins, stock, soups, stews, sauces, chutneys, salsas, pizza, bhajis and burgers.
types of spring onions (red bunching 'Crimson Forest' and multiplying 'White Welsh’), plus heirloom banana shallots and 'Cardiff' leeks. But of all the edible crops I've experimented with, from peanuts to pomegranates and soybeans to shiitake mushrooms, I'm most proud of the 4m2 bed that produces an annual barrowload of bog standard brown onions. Onions are slow but fairly easy to grow. Sow seed now, either direct or in trays of potting mix to transplant when their blades look like grass. Old-time gardeners meticulously thin and space seedlings to 15cm apart, but I find it easier to let them prosper in clumps and pluck the weaklings out as spring onions throughout the season. Harvest as summer turns to autumn and their tops brown off, leaving the uprooted bulbs to dry in the sun for a few days to cure their skins for better storage. Garlic can also be planted now, using either your best cloves from last year's crop, or locally grown bulbs from organic food stores. Plant only the fattest outer cloves (eat the rest), nestling them 5cm deep in rich, free-draining soil.
In lockdown, the first thing we ran out of wasn't flour, yeast, baking powder or eggs, but 'Pukekohe Longkeeper' onions. Oh, the tears I cried as I peeled my way through a bucket of piddling pickling onions.
In recent years, allium rust has raised its ugly orange-spotted head again, ruining many a home gardener's garlic crop. With no effective fungicides available, prevention is better than cure, and the best way to prevent this plague of rusty pustules is to plant early and harvest before the worst of the humid summer weather.
Alliums of all sorts are a mainstay in both my kitchen and vegetable garden. I grow three types of chives (broad-leafed, garlic and the standard species, Allium schoenoprasum), two
Leeks need to be bedded in by late summer in order to fatten sufficiently by winter, but leek seeds sown now can be harvested as baby leeks in late spring. Even better, sow leeks now and leave
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