Time for Onions

It's time, here in the southern zones 8/9 to start working on our gardens.  In an effort to get out while it is still cool during the days this is a great time to plant onions.  After a $4 investment at the feed store for onion sets I hope to harvest at least 25-30 onions in the early summer.  That is of course, assuming Missy didn't leave instructions with the rabbits to eat and destroy anything growing in the garden.

My hope is that with all the green stuff to eat out in the pastures the bunnies will eat that and not the little onions stems that I so carefully placed.  Besides eating the onions will give them bad breath.

I started with a garden that I tilled over Christmas break and then generally smoothed out the soil with a rake.  How many other blogs show dirt as their lead picture?  Not many, I know.  Thanks for coming back here anyway.

Thankfully we've had rain so the soil is not completely broken up anymore, but as I started digging, things were still easy to turn over.

After I planted the white onions, I decided that it would be a good idea to sort the onion sets from largest to smallest.  Not because I need for everything to be sorted and organized, but because I wanted to have some measurable sort of way to see if the larger onion starts produced more onions in the end or if it was the tiny baby plants that produced the 'fruit' of my labors.

Just so I have a record of it here, the larger red onions are closest to the fence.
Just sayin, I might forget.
The white ones are in there all willy-nilly.

After breaking up the ground with my spading for, I used the fork to make little holes for these guys to drop right in, but apparently didn't bother to take a picture of that.  But three fork-widths across allowed for six onions per main row.

So here they all are, ready for what may come.

Oh but then just as I was leaving the garden I realized I had a small insurance policy against the rabbits, and their voracious onion eating ways and consequential bad breath.

I've had success with this tiny piece of wire protecting other plants from the rabbits, they don't like to be trapped under it, and so far they've not wanted to walk on top of it.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed this continues.

There's still all this garden space to fill, but that can wait until things warm up a little more.