If the onion skin is very thin, a mild winter will be coming in, goes the old English rhyme. But if that skin is thick and tough? “Coming winter cold and rough,” that same verse concludes.
Uh-oh. If the hundred or so onions of three varieties harvested over the past few weeks are any indicator, perhaps we all should put up an extra cord of wood this summer, buy some new woolies and re-gird ourselves for this thing called life.
This year’s onions performed extraordinarily well. In fact, they were ready for harvest pretty much a full month ahead of schedule. Credit spring weather that was most conducive to “onioning.”
These alliums have been drying in the sun on a frame strung with chicken wire, supported by a pair of sawhorses. And, oh, the aroma!
There are so many yellows, whites and reds that there have been more than enough to share with neighbors (some twice) while not cheating the cellar onion bank.
The early harvest has produced another benefit – additional growing space with plenty of growing season left.
In the smaller of two raised beds used for onions this year, another planting – exclusively of yellow sets — has taken place. But in the larger bed, two varieties of carrots have been sown in the freshly amended soil.
Come late September and early October, after some gardeners already have put their beds to bed, this gardener will be harvesting two main ingredients of the first of the seasonal soups and stews.
Come winter, they’ll be the perfect complement to enjoying the fireplace in those long johns for some long hours of reflection.
It once was written that gardening is a grand teacher – of patience, industry, thrift and trust. Those just-harvested onions certainly are an object lesson in all four.
Plus something else.
Perhaps we should consider these onions’ thick skins as a certain sign and an apt metaphor for what we need to survive all that life can, and will, throw at us.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
