The alliums have moved home!

I should say some of our alliums have moved home namely the ones that have been living in the relative comfort of the greenhouse.

The garlic that was raised in pots has now been planted out on the plot. 

There isn't really a lot to choose between them at least not on the surface. This is maybe down to the fact that we haven't had a wet winter - the main reason that I start garlic in pots is to avoid them sitting in soggy soil. When it is very wet our clay soil some becomes waterlogged which isn't ideal for garlic. The cloves planted outside were slow to get going but now growth seems to have evened out. The pot grown garlic have developed good root systems - something that I can't check for the cloves planted straight in the ground. The elephant garlic started in pots is looking particularly strong. They are the ones at the front of the photo on the right.

At the moment two varieties are rather disappointing. Chesnok Red and Messidrome, although performing slightly better in the pots, haven't really grown very well in either location.

These two varieties are doing a little better in the large tubs but are still the ones that are performing worse at the moment

The garlic planted in the tubs have just been moved outside of the garden greenhouse.

I've planted out the shallots - Picasso and Yellow Moon - which were started in pots. These have made lots of growth so I hope they don't resent the move too much.

I've also planted out the onions that were also started off in pots in the greenhouse. These were Setton - yellow - and Snowball - white. We have three varieties of heat treated onion sets still to come. Heat treated sets are always available much later as they need time to undergo the treatment which kills the flower bud in the centre of the onion bulb. This means, if successful, (and it usually seems to be) the onion won't bolt as it has no flower bud to enable it to try to set seed.

The onions aren't planted as far apart as this photo implies - they are just spaced at a trowel head's length. I found last year that was about right to enable me to be able to weed among them without digging pulling up the onions.

It's about now that I start to think that we may have overdone the onions. As ever Martyn thinks it will be fine! As the ones grown last year rotted at an alarming rate in storage we decided to 'just make sure' we would buy extra sets. Having said all that we are still using our onions so last year's crop is managing to see us through. Onion soup anyone?