Every so often, a piece of produce is just so beautiful it stops you in your tracks. It happened to me yesterday with the onion in this photo. Gorgeous, right? I'd like to say I grew it myself but I didn't - it was one of many onions at a stand at the farmers market that were, quite simply, stunning and did, indeed, cause me (and others) to stop and ogle and buy. I do have some onions growing my garden - the Walla Walla onions that were planted in January. As you can see from the photo below, they are starting to bulb on the end of their stalks so I did some research to find out the best time to harvest them. According to an article from the National Gardening Association, it'll be time to harvest them when the tops holding the bulbs fall over. I will then bend the rest over and leave for a few more days, then pull up and leave for 24 hours sitting in the sun before bringing inside. (If any of you who've grown onions before have other tips you'd like to offer, feel free to send them in!)
After learning what to do with the onions, I looked into what happened to my garlic, which when I finally pulled it up had a very odd look. What I learned is that essentially I waited way too long to pull my garlic. Part of the reason is I didn't really realize that it was the garlic at first. As an experiment, I'd put some garlic cloves around the garden in the winter to see if it was true that this was all that was needed to do to grow the garlic bulbs. Well, it worked but I didn't really realize that that's what those stalks were until they were all brown (they should have been pulled up when they were just 1/3 brown). So the good news is that to grow garlic, you really do just need to stick a clove in the ground and the lesson learned is to then pull the newly grown garlic OUT of the ground a little earlier.