Gardening

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. 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. 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 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 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. 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

them alone for a full year. Although we treat them as an annual crop, they are perennial and, if left to flower, will send out a fresh flush of leeks off the base of the main stalk. Prise off as required. Using this lazy method, I haven't needed to sow new leeks in five years, plus the ball-shaped pale pink blooms last ages in a vase. Although I consider onions to be an essential service worker in my kitchen, friends on low FODMAP diets can't eat them (with the exception of pickled onions and the green parts of spring onions). And a very well-known New Zealand food writer—let's call her Lauraine—once told me she had developed an intestinal intolerance to onions. I was surprised by this culinary confession, for I thought overindulging on onions, especially raw ones, turned everyone's innards into wind tunnels. Lauraine has, at least, found a nifty substitute for flavoursome recipe bases: she sautés finely sliced Florence fennel bulbs instead. Sow these buxom beauties now as they do best in cool winter soil.

SEASONAL CHECKLIST

• Stockpile carbon for your compost heap. Rake up fallen leaves, mulch trimmings and pencil-thin prunings and set aside. Use these to layer between loads of green waste (food scraps, lawn clippings, spent crops etc.) • Intersow sweet peas with edible climbing peas.

‘Sugarsnap Climbing’ is a prolific podder that can also be harvested as an immature snow pea. • Sow salad greens, such as arugula, mesclun, Cos lettuce and baby spinach, in pots, and Chinese greens, such as tatsoi, bok choy, gai laan and wong bok, in garden beds. • Sow green manure or cover crops of mustard, broad beans and blue lupin in empty vege beds. Dig in come spring.

Lynda Hallinan

Waikato born-and-raised gardening journalist Lynda Hallinan lives a mostly self-sufficient life at Foggydale Farm in the Hunua Ranges, where she grows enough food to satisfy her family, free-range chooks, kunekune pig and thieving pukekos. She has an expansive organic vegetable garden and orchards and is a mad-keen pickler and preserver.

FALLS RETREAT GARDENING WORKSHOPS The Full Monty

$125pp includes morning tea, full day interactive workshop with Nicki Murray-Orr of VitalHarvest, notes to take home and a delicious shared lunch. Saturday July 4, August 1, September 5 www.fallsretreat.co.nz/the-full-monty

Edible Gardening for Beginners – Saturday 25 July

Includes morning tea, half day interactive workshop with notes to take home and delicious shared lunch – $75pp

Composting & Worm Farming – Saturday 25 July

Two-hour interactive workshop with take home notes and includes complimentary welcome drink and nibbles – $60pp SPECIAL OFFER – save 15% if you book both for $115

The Educated Gardener – Saturday 22 August

Aimed at those that want to build upon their gardening knowledge, this workshop focuses on bio-intensive planting methods, soil nutrition and our permaculture model. Includes morning tea, take home notes and a delicious shared lunch. $75pp

www.fallsretreat.co.nz