How to Grow Exceptional Produce

Growing vegetables: Harvesting your onions

with JANE SCOTTER — Leading biodynamic grower of fruit and vegetables. Supplier to Michelin star restaurant Spring.

Lesson 26 of 36

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It’s time to harvest the onions that Jane planted in spring. You’ll discover how to spot when an onion is ready to pull and how to remove it from the ground.

From the Lesson Workbook

Growing vegetables: Harvesting your onions

These are the same onions that were sown in the module trays earlier in the course. Ideally, you want to make sure they're quite tall before planting them out as they're much easier to transplant then. At Fern Verrow, we plant our onions out in May, so it takes around five to six weeks from sowing to transplantation.

Onions like a lot of water when they are germinating, but at the end of season, from late August onwards, you want to hold back on the water so they can start to dry out and develop their flavour.

How do you know that they're ready?

Onions are ready to harvest when their necks have weakened and started to go brown and crispy. Once this has happened, dig your onions out with a trowel instead of pulling them out as they're liable to snap.

Remove the worst of the soil and then hang them in the greenhouse in a sunny spot, which will help the skins to form.

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Jane Scotter

Your Instructor

Jane Scotter

Leading biodynamic grower of fruit and vegetables. Supplier to Michelin star restaurant Spring.

Jane Scotter has been farming at Fern Verrow - her certified biodynamic farm at the foothills of the Black Mountains in Herefordshire - since 1996, where she cultivates a wide range of truly seasonal vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers. Jane believes that vegetables and fruit grown in good soil, at the right time of year and open to the elements have a greatly enhanced character and flavour, and that size and shape are unimportant when compared to taste and true quality. Since 2015 she has had a farm-to-table collaboration with Michelin starred chef Skye Gyngell and her London restaurant, Spring, and also grows flowers for acclaimed London florists, JamJar Flowers.

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