Planting Onions In The Rain

“Now’s the time to plant those,” said the clerk at the feed store, as I slid a half-pound of tiny pearl-onion-sized bulbs into a paper bag.

“Good to know,” I said.

I wasn’t lying. I have never quite figured out vegetables, coming at gardening from the I-want-one-of-every-native-plant side as I have. I try to make lists of when to plant things, and then I lose the lists. And the feed store is arguably one of the great resources of small-town life. Where else can you get hypoallergenic dog food, bantam rooster chicks, seeds grown in North Carolina, mud boots, birdseed, horse medication, hay bales, plant starts, chicken coops, rabbit hutches AND rabbits, and in our particular feed store, rubber purses shaped like chickens?

Onions are a particular problem for me. There’s a couple of edibles I can do well, like basil and tomatoes and lettuces and little tiny cucumbers, and a couple I can do well enough, like peas and blueberries and bush beans, but onions and garlic both defeated me last year. And it’s not like I’m not up to my eyeballs in wild onions/ramps/whatever those are. They’re everywhere. They’re the first thing out of the ground in spring. Drive through the south and every lawn is full of thin green slivers. There’s even a Ramp Festival held in Cherokee, NC. Apparently they do ramp ice-cream. I do not understand what motivates otherwise sane people to make ramp ice cream, but then, I don’t understand a lot of things, including those fake testicles people hang on their pickup trucks and most professional sports.

This year, I was determined to succeed with onions. I had read up on “short-day” vs. “long-day” varieties (onions and their ilk are triggered into bulb growth by day length. In the north, you grow “long-day” and in the south you grow “short-day.) and was determined to plant the correct one this year. Hence the feed store. If anyone would have onions adapted for local conditions, it was them.

I went home and double checked. Onions should be set out as soon as the ground can be worked, my books informed me.

Well, technically that would have been New Year’s Day. The ground didn’t so much freeze this year as get vaguely tepid. Better get those onions in the ground now!

It was raining out. I pulled on a heavy housecoat, a fleece Cthulhu* hat and my brand new “Sloggers” mud boots, which my boyfriend bought me at the feed store in return for a promise that I would never ever wear them in public. (I had just killed yet another pair of gardening Birkenstocks. Generally I try to get Birks repaired, but these had not so much worn through as exploded. The last time I brought in a pair in this shape to the shoe repair guy, he accused me of stealing them from a dead person. Clearly a new solution was called for.)

I dumped a load of my newly acquired organic mushroom compost over the vegetable bed as a top dressing, spread it out to about an inch thick, poked holes in it, and planted out the tiny little onions.

There is something oddly pleasant about working in the rain, assuming that you are warm and the rain is a generalized drizzle, not one of the “frogstranglers” that sometimes afflict us. All the garden smells are activated by the rain. When I yanked up some of the dill in the vegetable bed, it smelled intensely and archetypally of dill, a clean sharp smell that I love, but which will probably never catch on as a perfume. The pile of mushroom compost is next to the pile of hardwood mulch. The mushroom compost smells vaguely of stables—manure missing a few of the top notes—and the mulch smells of cedar chests, and the two of them together make exactly the scent of the rabbit barns on the first day of the State Fair. (You know the one. The stable has been newly cleaned and the sawdust is fresh, but there’s still a bunch of small nervous animals pooping in it.) It’s not an unpleasant smell, if you’re a gardener, or presumably a rabbit fancier.

It is a light enough rain that I’m not alone in the garden. The Carolina chickadees are raiding the birdfeeder, while a flock of dark-eyed juncos hops and scurries underneath, cleaning up after The Incident earlier today, when I attempted to open a bag of birdseed with my pruning shears, one-handed. (It was a learning experience for everyone.) When I push my little red wheelbarrow past the feeders, they all take off into the brush pile at the far end of the garden. A blindingly red male cardinal doesn’t bother to leave—he’s on the more distant safflower feeder, and anyway, he’s pretty sure he could take me in a fight.

There is even a large frog in the pond, perched in the pot of sunken Louisiana iris. My frog ID skills give up at “probably a bronze frog.” I can hear the skreeking of other frogs—cricket frogs, most likely—advertising their interest in wild frog-sex in the drainage ditches. Occasionally a cricket frog will leap out of the way of the wheelbarrow or my feet, probably on the way to said drainage ditches. When you garden for wildlife, you never garden alone.

It does not take terribly long to plant eighteen tiny onions. As the vast majority of my garden is taken up with perennials, my actual vegetable gardening space is minimal. I wandered around for a bit wondering what else I could do. I’m still warm, and there’s nothing quite like being warm and toasty when the air is cold around you. Hmm. Well, the peas need to be planted “several weeks before last frost.”  It is currently anyone’s guess as to when we will get the last frost out here—given our freakishly warm weather, it could be tomorrow, given the basic perversity of meteorology, it could be mid-April.

Well, I lose nothing by planting them out too early—if they are killed by a sudden hard freeze, then I will simply plant more. Since I don’t have any more space for pea plants than I do for onions, I still have three-quarters of last year’s seed packet left, and I’d prefer to use them before the germination rates sink too low. (I am having fairly good luck with “Wando,” an heirloom variety that can take the heat of the Southeast a little better than some others, but they sell ‘em in packs of 200, and I have space for maybe two dozen.) Two more barrow-loads of mushroom compost prepares their new bed, complete with bright red metal teepees that I set aside for trellising. I plant out twenty-four seeds.

There are probably a few other things I could do—sow the “Bull’s Blood” beets, say, or the scarlet runner beans, which depending on what book you read is so utterly tender that saying the word “frost” will stunt it, or is tough enough not to care if the seedlings get a touch of chill (I will try sowing a few soon, and a few once it warms up, and see who’s right in my garden. This will probably still leave me with half a package of unused seeds, and at least I’ll know.)

But it’s getting cold out. Gardening in the rain is only a delight to the senses when you’re warm, and once your gloves become cold and wet, much of the pleasure is lost. Time to peel them off and go inside. I will leave the garden to the chickadees and the cardinals and the over-sexed cricket frogs, who don’t need gloves and don’t mind the rain, and who are the real owners of the garden anyway.

*If you do not know Cthulhu, he is a very famous science fiction monster shaped vaguely like a squid. The hat has tentacles. It is a good hat.

© 2012, Ursula Vernon. All rights reserved. This article is the property of BeautifulWildlifeGarden.com If you are reading this at another site, please report that to us