Onions have been revered through time, not only for their culinary use, but also for their therapeutic properties. For example, onions are one of the few vegetables that are a source of biotin, a B vitamin, which is important for healthy hair and nails. Biotin also helps your body to digest fatty foods (hence that steak-and-onions pairing).

There are, of course, very few meals that don’t involve the peeling and chopping of an onion. So, it’s a stroke of good fortune that one of the healthiest and more useful kitchen vegetables is also very easy to grow. A decent-size raised bed will produce a couple of hundred onions (you get approximately 40 onions per metre in a 1.2m wide bed), which would be enough for most families for a year.

You know your onions are ready to harvest when the foliage turns yellow and literally topples over (approximately 20 weeks after sowing). One of the most remarkable sights you will ever see in your vegetable plot is a bed of onions getting itself ready for harvest. In the last weeks of summer, a nutrient tug-of-war of sorts happens between the bulb and its foliage. The bulb starts to suck all the vitamins and minerals from the foliage until, finally, thoroughly beaten, the foliage turns yellow, withers and then topples over dramatically in a final act of surrender.

It’s a good idea at this stage to gently loosen the soil around the onions or turn the onion very carefully and very slightly in the soil. Loosening the soil like this allows the onion to expand in the soil. After this, leave for another two weeks, and then your onions are ready to be picked. Lift them carefully (you may be able to ease them out without using a fork, but be careful not to damage the necks as you pull them). It’s worth eating a few of them at this stage, because they are literally bursting with nutrition.

Having braided them, I will leave them in the shed for another month or so and then move them in to the kitchen. Braiding onions is a time-consuming process, but the onion braid hanging in the kitchen makes me smile each time I see it. It’s a daily reminder that I am not such a bad grower after all, and a potent symbol of the wonderful potential of back-yard food growing to make you more food secure. CL

For further information and recipes, visit www.giy.ie.

Storing Onions

It’s perfectly fine to eat onions “fresh”, straight from the ground, but the key to getting them to store is to get all the moisture from the neck and skin, which means drying them out well. The ideal way to dry them is to leave them out in the sun and wind but, given the Irish climate, if I have to, I resort to laying them out on a wire rack in my potting shed for about two to three weeks and then hanging them in a twine braid.

To make a braid, simply make a loop with a piece of twine, and wrap the withered stems of the onions around the twine. It’s a good idea to clean the onions before braiding them, getting most of the dried soil or damaged skins cleaned off.

Make sure to store your hard-earned onions somewhere very dry. If there is any moisture at all in the air, the onions may rot. Check the braid frequently and use/remove any onions that are showing signs of softening. Remove any shoots that form over winter.