This is the first year that I have successfully grown regular onions in my garden. I’ve tried in years past, but always from seed, and I never got nice bulbs at the end of the onion. Green onions I can grow without thinking about, but bulbing onions eluded me for years.
This year I bought onion sets in the spring and planted a double row all around my community garden plot as a natural animal repellent. I think the animal repellent part worked rather well. I still had some critters doing damage, but not enough to really complain about. When the salsa pot fired up at the beginning of August it was pure joy to harvest my own onions to put into my homemade salsa. Those first few batches of salsa utilized only vegetables that I grew myself- something I am quite proud of.
But as I’ve harvested the larger onions over the last month for salsa, what remains are of a much smaller diameter.
They are too small to pull and cure for long term storage just as they are, but with a quick run through the food processor, freezing these onions in ready-to-use packaging is the perfect solution. After harvesting this morning I washed them, peeled them and cut them into chunks before letting the processor chop them into bits.
I packed the chopped onions into pint freezer bags in 1 cup amounts- so many recipes call for 1 cup of chopped onion, or one medium onion- which is about 1 cup or so. Then I placed the pint freezer bags into a larger gallon sized freezer bag. This is the vital step in freezing onions- the double bag in freezer bags. Vacuum sealing will work also, but again, you must double bag. The first year I froze onions I used one freezer bag and the entire freezer began smelling and tasting like onions! Take the time to double bag.
I harvested just one corner of the garden this morning, and my afternoon of work produced 11 cups of frozen, chopped onions. That’s about 11 pots of soup, chili, curry or stew worth of onions! I expect I’ll be able to do this two more times before using all the onions up. Next I’ll package them in 1 1/2 cups per pint bag for those times I need just a few more onions. A small bit of work now for big rewards in the months ahead.
How very clever of you, Erika. Your onions are gorgeous! One year – probably 20 or so ago – my hubby and I planted a garden in an area that had never been a garden, so what we planted thrived. Since shallots were so expensive we planted bunches of them (amidst numerous other produce). Those shallots produced a gazillion of them, but they were so small I could hardly justify the time it took to prep them. I ended up giving them to a friend and SHE did all the prep and got to keep them all. BUT, she and I laugh about it to this day – it took her all day, nearly, to harvest about a cup of shallots. So, congratulations on your lovely onion harvest!!
Funny that you mention the time involved with the shallots, Carolyn, because the small pile of onions took SO much longer to process than I expected. Especially since I was using a food processor to do the actual chopping! Still worth it in the end, but it took several hours instead of the little while I thought it would take.