Hercules v Sturons

A slightly disappointing onion crop. Although they all looked great on the surface, a significant number of onions had rotted in the ground - 42 of the 200 (so 20% of the crop) have been chucked away. The vast majority of these are the Hercules variety, which although having produced some real monsters, have not matched the Sturon for reliability and quality. The Sturons, although not as good as last year's crop, look pretty uniform and solid.

So I declare Sturon the winner!

They will get grown for a third year running next season and go up against a different variety. If this was Onion Pop Idol, I'd be Simon Trowel.

Thieving magpies

Popped up the allotment last night to deliver an old bookcase for storage use in the shed to discover some thieving **** has stolen a dozen brand new patio slabs that I had nestled against the shed. They were acting as weights to prevent said shed from taking off in the wind and the plan was to lay them as a path this Autumn. That's £40-50 worth shipped off-site I suspect, as my plot is right next to one of the carpark areas, meaning it would be very easy for somone to back their car up near my shed and quickly wang the slabs in the boot without too much attention.

The offenders were good enough though to leave one of the slabs behind to prop the shed door shut. How kind!

This week's top job is to harvest our white onion crop - I have about 200 Centurion and Sturon awaiting lifting. If it's not raining this evening I plan to get them up, out and drying.

Question: What can I pop in the gap they will leave? Anything that might still give me an Autumn crop? Chard? Beetroot? Turnips? Salad onions, radishes & leaves?

Know your onions

Onion 1: "Hello, I'm Hercules!"
Onion 2: "Hello, I'm Sturon!"
Onion 1: "Where's Centurion?"
Onion 2: "He didn't make it."

The postman delivered my 2nd seed order from E.W.King & Co. Ltd yesterday. The centrepiece of the bulging jiffy was a pair of 500g white onion set bags. One Sturon bag, one Hercules F1 bag. Last year we grew Sturons and they were magnificent - the envy of my allotment neighbours. Medium sized bulbs, excellent quality globe-shaped, clear white flesh, strong flavour and a low attrition rate is terms of both losses in the ground and post-lifting storage in the garage. After asking the advice of Barry The New Head Of Our Allotment Society and a couple of allotment-focused tweeters, I've gone with them again this year. This ticks the allotment rule box of "if it grows well on your plot one year, then it probably loves your soil type and you should grow it again".

But there is a second allotment rule box that must be ticked: "in your first few years you should experiment with different varieties to see which does best on your plot". After a careful selection policy of eeny-meany-minee-mo, I've gone with Hercules F1 over Centurion F1. The deciding factor was the internet blurb on the Dobies of Devon site that Hercules put down their roots fast - something that didn't happen with our red onions last year and that ultimately stunted the crop. Hercules apparently offer an earlier yield than Sturon and have a yellow and mild flesh.

E.W. King offer both varieties at a bargain £2.45 per 500g bag and the two bags together should give at least 25m worth of onion rows. We'll be looking to get all the sets in the ground this weekend, weather permitting.

Centurion will rotate in next year, replacing the weaker of this years performers.

Onion 1: "Did you hear that?! If we don't perform we're in for the chop!"
Onion 2: "The way I understand it, if we DO perform we'll still be in for the chop... and the slice!"

The rest of the jiffy bag featured:

Tomatoes = Ferline, Harbinger and Gardener's Delight (all of which should do well outside)

Leeks = Jolant and Blue Solaise (my Christmas present book The River Cottage 4 - Veg Patch reckons that growing leeks from seed is dead easy, so we're going to give it a go with these early and late varieties)

Sweetcorn = Early Extra Sweet F1 (last year these failed but that was due to them not going in early enough, so I've changed my mind since November and decided to try again)

Celeriac = Giant Prague (some books say these are difficult to grow, others say easy, so we'll roll the dice on these this Summer and see what happens)

Pepper = Hungarian Wax (I'm hoping this is a the Hot Wax variety - for growing indoors rather than on the plot)

Calendula = Orange King (aka Marigold - the classic companion flower and a deliberate attempt to increase the interest of my daughter in the plot)

All of these are of course on top of my order made at the end of last year, which means I have way too much seed.

Onion 1 & 2: "A lot of it will keep for next year too!"