My personal plug for onions!

I’m a firm believer in growing onions and here’s why. Of all the other vegetables I work with during the regular growing season, the onion ‘set’ has them beat in a couple of ways! First, you can buy them cheaply at the store in a form that is already a growing plant! Second, once they are plopped into the ground they require very little in the way of maintenance. (I’ve harvested onions from one section of my garden that was overgrown with weeds and which received little additional water other than what fell from the sky one year and they were great)! I even did a video some years ago, ‘Onions are easy to grow’ that I think captures some of my enthusiasm for this most wonderful veggie.

Onions - Not Just for Breakfast

Onions have been around for just about forever, I think. I know they are one of the oldest cultivated plants in existence. I like them for a couple of reasons; they taste good and they can hang out in the garden long after other crops have bolted or withered away. Every spring season, they are among the very first guys planted in my garden, usually in the form of onion sets. After only a few weeks, they send a set of slender green stalks that, if harvested at that point, are called green or spring onions. I love to dice these up and add them to my salads. Later in the season, assuming you have thinned them to stand a few inches apart, you may see them bulb up into regular onions that can be pulled, cured and then used throughout the fall.

Did you know that the regular consumption of onions has been shown to lower high cholesterol levels and high blood pressure? Two problems common to many of us. I’m told these beneficial effects are likely due to onions' sulfur compounds, its chromium and its vitamin B6. The studies are still on-going but early results have been very encouraging. Now if I could just figure out what to do about the bad breath!