Tending Winter Onions

This week Dirty Nails has been busy in his winter onion bed. The Radar onions which he planted as sets in September have taken well. Their healthy greenery on top indicates strong rooting down below, which is vital for a heavy crop. At this time of year the onions have settled down and won’t make any visible growth for a while. It’s the perfect opportunity to get in amongst them and have a good tidy up.

Dirty Nails likes to weed on his hands and knees between the rows first. The weeds are not far past the seedling stage and have tenacious roots. They need to be teased out whole. A kitchen fork is used to gently extract them from the damp soil. He works slowly forwards along the rows like this, filling a bucket with young weeds as he goes. The bed soon cleans up, and the onions show off handsomely in their lines. With this job done, Dirty Nails employs his hoe. He hoes carefully, moving backwards, pushing and pulling the blade back and fore, roughing up the soil surface and disturbing any tiny weeds that are just germinating. This is a job that Dirty Nails thoroughly enjoys, not least because it feels so satisfying to be genuinely weeding and hoeing in December.

All members of the onion family appreciate the goodness contained in wood ash. Radars are no exception. Dirty Nails will be sprinkling down and hoeing in a top dressing of wood ash during early spring. To this end he saves and stores all ash from home fires and bonfires, which needs to be kept dry prior to use.

Natural History In The Garden: Badgers In December

Female (sow) badgers may have held fertilised eggs in their bodies since last spring, but now is the time when amazing internal processes cause the egg to become implanted in the womb. Usually litters comprise two or three cubs, to be born any time from mid-January to the end of March.

Vegetable Snippets: Wood Ash

Wood ash is a useful byproduct of bonfires in the garden. Having a regular burn-up is an important job. Fires cleanly and effectively get rid of diseased plant material, and deal with troublesome weeds such as thick-rooted dandelions, persistent creeping buttercup, and the seemingly impossible-to-kill trio of bindweed, couch grass and horsetail. Dirty Nails loves standing beside a crackling blaze, warming his hands, absorbing the deliciously romantic aroma of wood smoke into his clothes and hair. Fire is a magical, elemental force, and although not quite living it is nontheless very much alive. In no time fire transforms harmful waste into a valuable resource which will do the veggies no end of good.

Wood ash is almost pure potash. This is beneficial to all crops in varying degrees. Sugary and starchy veg demand it to help their metabolism. For instance, spuds love it when sprinkled between the rows as a top dressing prior to earthing them up in the summer. Potash is high in potassium which is a nutrient that encourages flowering and fruiting. Hence it is good for beans, curcubits (squashes, marrows, cucumbers and the like), tomatoes and others that set a fruiting crop. Dirty Nails shakes a handful around the base of these plants when they are coming to this stage of their lives.

A week or so before sowing, wood ash is applied to a prepared seedbed at the rate of about one heaped trowel per square yard (1 square metre). It will be appreciated by the developing seedlings.