Our homegrown onion harvest | VLOG

Hey y'all, welcome back to Roots and Refuge Farm. We are heading out to the high tunnel. We have a guest today. Hi mom. Hey. Oh come on camera. All right now it's focusing. Hi mom. We have a task ahead of us. My mom is here because it is graduation weekend. So she's here for Asher's graduation and guys remember the day that we planted the onions? Yeah. It doesn't feel like that long ago, right? And look what we have to show for our work. That was worth it, huh? Yeah. Onions are pretty hands-off things. So what we are doing today is we are going to harvest the onions. Ben, let me show you what we're going to do. Look. So feed this green down. Wait, this is meant for that? Yep. And what we want is to hang these onions with the green hanging down. Mom, are we going to carry these back? No, we're going to leave them here to dry up. You can brush off any like big chunks and stuff, but you don't have to get them super clean. We'll clean them off once they're dry and it won't peel the skin. These are a little small, but go ahead. Yeah, that's fine. Some of them split into multiples. You want Yeah, it doesn't matter. So we planted these from onion starts from Dixondale Farms back in February. So three months later, we're about to harvest a lot of onions. It's been very hands-off. Honestly, I haven't even weeded the space, which it shows. If they're too small, you can just lay them down on the end. Like I could probably fill this whole high tunnel with onions and that would fit our need for the year. I don't grow as many as I use. I end up having to buy onions simply because I don't have a great storage solution to store them long enough. We have red Creole as one of the varieties. One, I think it's called Texas Sweet and the other one's like Texas Early or something like that. But they're all just what was recommended for our area. So anyway, we're going to get to harvesting. Are y'all turning the onions into blades? He was. Did it hit you with onion juice? Is that what that face was, Toby? Yeah. Toby, do not get that too close. The juice inside is hard for it to get in your eyes. What are you doing, Ben? I like to eat onions. You want to eat it? Just peeling the outside off. I'm trying. I'm nervous. It's okay. If you don't like it, you don't have to eat anymore. Just take a small bite because it is spicy. Do you want to try? It's okay if you don't want to eat it plain like that. That's an acquired taste. I bet grandma will eat it. Grandma will love it. What does it taste like? It's spicy. It tastes like onion. It tastes raw. Well, it is raw. Yeah, grandma loves it. They're so sweet and fresh. Yeah. Is the texture gross? Take a little, take a small bite. Now, if you cut that up and put it in some salsa. Ezra, do you want to taste it? Strong. I don't think Ezra wants to taste it. Do you want to taste it, Ezra? Ezra? No, thank you. What do the Texas sweets taste like? They're, I mean, similar sweet. Red onions are more commonly eaten raw. Of course, the Texas sweets are good raw too, but. Mom, is this gonna, when they're all done, are you gonna have this as the, like, as the, what's it called? Thumbnail? Yeah, that would be a good thumbnail, don't you think? Yeah. Well, I need one. Try to skip one space in between them, okay? Just really make sure there's no space in between. Mom, you want me to break this hard part off? Yes, please. Is this part edible? Uh, we could probably dry it and ground it up and make an onion powder. Can I go get some water? Of course. I will use my picking arms. These little ones, I just realized, can kind of flop over the side. Oh, that's smart. Over the little wire. Okay, salsa makes onion and needs onions. What else? Spaghetti needs onions. Dad's spaghetti sauce needs onions. Any grilled onions are good. Dad's spaghetti sauce needs onions. Yeah, pretty much everything I cook gets onions in it and garlic. Fries get onions. I love fried onions. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we slice onions and fry them with french fries. That's what Papa T does. That's what we made last night. No, just, that's just sliced up sweet onions. He said he'll do the picking, you do the pudding. He's figuring out how to work it. Toby, you want to do the picking and I'll do the pudding? Sure. Okay, and Ezra will do the sitting and the side by side. Yeah, he's been picking blueberries and feeding us. What do y'all think? The leek can lay there, that's fine. Singular leek. Look at that. That's pretty satisfying, huh? Yeah. Good work. It is beautiful. What is mine I'm eating right here? It's got some dirt on it. Oh, many hands make light work. That was a lot faster than had I done it by myself, so I appreciate the help. I think they're okay. I salted some over. So what we're doing here is, this is called curing. You can totally pull your onions fresh out, go peel the outer, you know, dirty skin off and then use them right away. They're so juicy. They're really delicious. You could do what my mother is doing right now and just eat them raw, standing in the garden, if that's how you roll. I definitely have done that a time or two. But this is curing and it's for the sake of storage. So there's so much moisture in these onions right now that if we were to go like pile them up in crates in the pantry, they would mold. So by leaving them here, all the outer layers are going to dry. The green is going to dry. This way of drying them here, this is a livestock panel, I think is what they call it. It's the ones with two by three inch holes and it works perfectly to hold the onion while the greens hang down and when the breeze comes through here, which this high tunnel has a really nice cross breeze, it's going to blow through here and help dry this quickly. Did you find another? Oh, three more. So you want to dry your onions in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place, not in full sun. So actually a high tunnel is not the most ideal situation. It'd be really great if I had like a shop or something like that and when we do have like our big workshop build, that's where I'll do things like this. However, this does have 50% shade cloth on it and what it lacks in coolness, it makes up for in ventilation because we have a really nice breeze and this is the best I've got right now. If you have any onions that have a seed stem, like if they were trying to go to seed, make sure you break that off before you dry them because it will still try to flower. So if you were to take any flower, like these dahlias right here, if I were to go dig them up and lay them out, they would keep trying to bloom and they would pull all of the energy they could out of their root. Well, in the case of onions, I don't want them to do that. So if you leave that seed stem on, it'll still bloom while the onion lays here drying and it'll just shrivel the root up. So you want to make sure you break those off. Now some people will cut the tops off of their onions when they're growing to get the bulbs bigger. I've never done that. I've never really felt like I needed to. I have, you know, I mean we get really good sized onions. What we're looking for to harvest is when the ends turn brown and they're laid over like they were. Once they're laid over like that, they're pretty well done. I don't know. I've never cut the tops off. Maybe I the result I usually get. And I have here, I've got this whole bed of leeks and Ben grabbed one out over here and they're actually about ready to harvest too, but they're not super close to going to seed. They haven't browned on the tips much. They haven't started falling over. So I'm going to give them more time, simply to give me more time because I'm going to dry these. Once they've been here for three weeks, if they have ample green, I will braid a lot of these and you just braid the green together and you can hang those up. I'll hang them in my pantry. If they don't, I'll just cut the green off and those will be the ones that we'll kind of grab for first. I also have shallots over here and they're pretty dang close to being ready to get out too, but maybe once I get these onions situated. I don't know. I may pull the shallots sooner rather than later, but I really want to use that drying rack for all of these. Oh yeah, that's kind of, you know, I'm always bummed. I'm so happy when I harvest things, but then I'm bummed that it's not in the garden anymore because I just love seeing it. It looks so abundant. Now it's just empty, but the space for what's next. Yeah, well, I think that I'll rake this out and get all of this grass and all the stuff out and then we'll amend it again. And I'm probably going to put beans in here is kind of what I'm thinking because that's something that'll be fast, but I want to be able to do, you know, this will be where my early, that's one of the flower stems from the onions I pulled off. Well, I mean they're alliums, so all their blooms look the same. Yeah. So here's a flower stem from one of the onions and I just ripped that off. You can actually eat these blooms. They're really nice. It's just like mild little onion flavor. I would say just guessing, I mean, just like I counted a section of 20 and multiplying that space, probably about 260 here. You would have won. If I'm right, he would have won. I think I'm right. I just counted one section of 20 and kind of measured that and then multiplied it. You ready to hop on, Mom? Y'all ready for lunch? I incentivized my helpers by telling them we would go to Beulah and get drinks when we left. All right, y'all ready to say goodbye? You coming, Benny? Let's wait for Ben. All right, thank you for hanging out with us today. We bless you. Until next time.