Onion'n'Leeks

With the title of this post, I bet you thought I was going to do a Guns'n'Roses parody. Not.

Saturday was amazing weather so the boys (Reed, Johnny & Chris) finished planting 6000 onions and 3000 leeks. We still have 2000 cippolini onions to go, but we ran out of compost.

Here is why the compost is important...

Exotic Cheesy Acorn Squash and Leek Dip

Lisa created a great dip for using acorn squash (or the squash of your choice) and leeks. The ingredients can be used with chips or grilled baguette slices.

I normally suggest people cook their squash whole, but in this case it is beneficial to cut then in half and remove the seeds.

We served this when we had company the other night to rave reviews.

How to Select the Best Leeks

The use of leeks in cooking is growing in popularity in the last few years. It is important for the consumer to understand how to select the best leeks...

How to Plant Leeks, A Deep Subject

Onions grow on top of the ground and bulb enlargement takes place at the air to soil boundary. Leeks are typically planted in trenches about 8 inches below the ground. Leeks do not form a bulb but...

How to Select a Great Leek

I have watched countless customers select leeks over the years and they often don't select the ones with the most usable leek. I watched one customer last week carefully pick the leeks with the best leaves and pass by leeks where we had removed most of the leaves (to get it to fit in the tub we transport them in). The leeks that were passed over had nearly 3X the usable leek and would store as long or longer than the "pretty" ones. Okay so how do you pick a great leek?

First a lesson in leek anatomy. The usable part of the leek is from the roots to the leaves. The longer the shank (this region from the roots to the leaves) is, the more usable leek there is. Diameter is good too. There is no advantage to a smaller leek diameter in terms of tenderness.

Do leeks need to be buried to blanch the shanks.  Well you can if you like but I have not found there to be much difference.

So if this is the case, why are all the leeks in the stores short and stubby. I'll let you ponder this a moment before I give you the reason............... OK, time's up. It is because these short stubby dwarf leeks fit on the shelf! How is that for a value proposition.

The leeks we grow are tall stately, have great flavor, and offer 3x the value of the typical store bought leek. We also grow the leeks in a highly mineralized soil with excellent compost. So you get flavor, nutrition and great value all in one.

See my post on potato leek soup and leek fritters for some serving ideas.

10 Reasons I Like Fall

My farmer dad says that fall is his favorite season. I think he said that because he finally got to harvest all the stuff he worked so hard to grow that year.

1) Salsa Freak - Tomatoes, Peppers and Onions (see our simple recipe)
2) Candy Carrots - The adage is frost on the pumpkins, but we like frost on the carrots.
3) Leeks, Onions and Shallots "Oh My"
4) Heirloom Tomatoes for BLT's
5) Watermelon - 15 varieties
6) Winter Squash
7) Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkins
8) Cool Weather
9) Planting Garlic
10) Fall Broccoli

The Jedi Master of Root Growing

Reed is our Jedi root grower. He has done an amazing job with this since he was very young. He is very good at planting onions and can do about twice as many plants as two other people.

Two years ago he'd pick, clean and sell 300 lbs of sweet summer onions a week at our market. He would completely bury a six foot long table with beautiful sweet onions. He called this strategy "Pile them high an kiss 'em goodbye".

He also loves radishes both to eat and to sell. 100 lbs of bunch radishes a week was not unusual.

Potatoes is the other specialty crop he excells in. He digs and clean about 100 lbs of nice little baby potatoes a week. When he was little he wasn't heavy enough to get the fork in the ground so we would work together, with me digging and Reed picking the potatoes off of the plant and carefully putting them in the tub we picked into.

He is also very good at leeks. He peels them and clips them, and afterwards they shine; a beautiful shade of white.

How to (Finally) Plant Onions

We finally got some good weather to be able to plant onions this weekend. Reed, Jenna and I planted about 6000 small onion plants over the last couple of days.

About 7 years ago we planted onions with a mechanical planter pulled behind a tractor with a hydro static transmission. This type of tractor can go creepy crawly slow. You can crawl faster than the tractor's ground speed. This is just what the doctor ordered when planting transplants. However this tractor is very heavy an d caused soil compaction on wet spring soils so I don't use it anymore.

We now plant onions by hand. It takes three people a little over and hour to plant several thousand plants. We plant about 15,000 onions and leek plants per season. The process takes several weeks.
This year we are getting a very late start.

The onions need to be very well established by May when the day length requirements are met and they start to enlarge. It is just amazing how quickly the onions explode in size when we reach June. They go from the size of your thumb to softball size in a matter of weeks. Very cool.

We till the soil, fertilize lightly with organic fertilizer and then I lay down a strip of compost 12 inches wide and 3-4 inches deep. It takes about 2000 lbs of compost to make a row 300-400 feet long. We will create about 10 rows like this for our onion crop this year. If this seems like a lot of work and copious amounts of compost, it is!

Why do we plant this way?

1. Onions are very sensitive to weeds and don't compete very well. The compost  creates a weed barrier to keep weeds out of the rows. We weed lightly every 2-3 weeks during the season and the onions are nearly weed free.
2. I'd rather scoop a little compost, well, OK, A Lot of Compost, than weed.
3. The flavor of onions grown this way is out of this world. They are sweeter and the storage quality is amazing.
4. The flavor is better because of the minerals and organic components in the compost. The compost feeds the life in the soil. When we pick onions, we find significant quantities of earth worms around the roots.
5. Did you know that the plants "talk" to the organisms around their roots. They give off sugar exudates which attract the bacteria and fungi that will convert nutrients to the form the plants need. This is what attracts the earth worms. They are there cleaning up the root zone and eating the left overs.
6. Onions are light feeders and you can almost get by with just compost and earthworms for fertility. But if you want jumbo onions they need a littl starter fertilizer and a booster shot of fish emulsion before the onions start to enlarge in June.