Onions and the Paddy field

The fourth in a series of articles about the progress of the barganews vegetable garden. Well there I was twittering on about how we had just planted 25kilos of seed potatoes just before the rain fell and happily bleating on about “Perfect timing in the barganews vegetable garden”  hahahahaha! Perfect timing ? One or two lessons became quickly clear this week – there is no such thing as prefect anything as far as growing things in the soil in concerned. Yes, it rained and then some and then some more and just so as not to break the habit, it kept on raining for the next couple of days. The bottom of the potatoes field turned over night miraculously into a kind of paddy field. Rice would have been more the order of the day than spuds, who by this time were starting to evacuate the flooded field in disorderly and decidedly damp retreat. A hastily dug trench gave the encroaching water another less damaging exit point and so maybe, just maybe the day was saved but the rain only left off for a few hours and as I write it is hammering down once again on the roof above me. I wonder what we will find in the morning ? Hmmm, this growing vegetables thing seems to be a character growing exercise as well.

So to the onions.

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The onions that were planting in the area by people hoping to take advantage of the early spring warmth were more or less all damaged by the sudden cold spell that followed. For once being late in planting was actually an advantage. The only problem now was that the best sort of onion – the red onions known as Tropea was now almost impossible to find. After scouring a couple of agraria in search of the elusive Cipolla Rossa di Tropea I finally found some at the Agraria in Mologna run by my friend,  Persio Da Prato.

Persio is a painter who is trying to sell his Agraria business so that he can get down to the serious business of full time painting. His Agraria used to be in the middle of a sleepy little hamlet just outside Barga but with the building of the new commercial centre just outside the railway station in Mologna, the place should be buzzing shortly. If there is anybody interested in this business opportunity then more information is here)

The red onion from Tropea, Italy, (Italian: “Cipolla Rossa di Tropea”) is a particular variety of red onion which grows in a small area of Calabria in southern Italy named “Capo Vaticano” near the city of Tropea. This onion has a stronger and sweeter aroma and the inner part is juicier and whiter than other red onions and it is possible to make a marmalade with it.

I left Mologna with 6 bunches of 50 Tropea – 300 plants and a kilo of small white onions bulbs – enough onions to feed an army don’t you think ?

It took the pair of us two and a half hours of shoulder wrenching, back twitching, arm aching digging to plant those onions. The water  sodden soil had turned to a clinging heavy clay like substance that stuck sullenly to the only zappa – the  hoe that we processed so that each time it was lifted, so was a couple of kilos of a earth. That zappa changed hands many times over the afternoon as arms gave out and then moved on to the easier task of laying out the onions in “neat” rows. The first blisters had now arrived.

At one point we were so convinced that the once cheerful looking virgin soil from a couple of days ago had turned to heavy obstinate clay overnight, that I took a handful of it and modelled it into a head and shoulders and left it standing on a pole as a kind of totem bird scarer.

I have a feeling we are going to need more than clay heads to keep some of the birds away.

Next up on the list …  some decent scarecrows

Costs so far for the barganews vegetable garden –

transport compost                  – euro 20
Petrol  rotovator                      – euro 10
Organic fertiliser                      – euro 10
25 kilos seeding potatoes     – euro 30
300 Tropea/1 kilo white       – euro20

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– euro 90

By the way – some of the images on this article have been shot by the Canadian photographer Jesse Henry. More images from Barga including some stunning shots of La Fornacetta can been seen on his blog here