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Garden in the City: Look, It's a Bloomin' Onion! (Or Maybe a Leek)

By Patty Wetli | September 19, 2014 5:23pm | Updated on September 22, 2014 9:38am
 It's a bloomin' onion, which, by the way, is not a good sign.
It's a bloomin' onion, which, by the way, is not a good sign.
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DNAinfo/Patty Wetli

LINCOLN SQUARE — I have a four-foot tall onion (or possibly leek) with a flower on top.

That can't be right.

Back in May, I planted a variety of onions — technically, a variety of members of the Allium family, of which onion is but one sibling — believing them to be one of lowest-maintenance crops around.

I sowed rows of green onion seeds between squares of carrots and lettuce and scattered onion bulbs and leeks around the rest of my plot.

And then I forgot about them.

Patty Wetli describes her leek adventure on this week's episode of Garden in the City:

If they were nourished by water, fertilizer or compost, it was purely second-hand TLC, a byproduct of the excessive amount of affection I showered on my corn and to a lesser extent my tomatoes and beans — a sort of benign neglect likely to send sensitive scallions into therapy for years.

Every once in awhile, as I harvested beans or snipped off lettuce leaves for salads, I'd come across a bulb poking out of the dirt. (Two-thirds of an onion, I would later learn, grows on top of the soil. For more fun facts like this, visit the National Onion Association website.)

Oh, that's where you are, I'd say, and maybe I'd pluck the onion or maybe I'd leave it.

And then my corn was ravaged.

And my tomatoes cracked up.

And the beans petered out.

And the peppers — didn't even know I had 'em, did you? — well they went bust back in June, crowded out by taller, more aggressive neighbors.

It's mid-September and onions are suddenly the only game in town. And now don't I wish I'd been a better mother.

"I'd like to grow leeks, but I'm afraid they're too complicated," was a common message I came across in gardening forums.

What on earth were these people so scared of? I wondered. Stick your seedlings in the ground, walk away and three months later pull up bigger versions than you planted.

Oh, ignorance, thy name is Patty.

Leeks, it turns out, can be cultivated to reach epic proportions (see the blog post "How to Grow Huge Ass Leeks") if, and this is a big if, you know what you're doing.

I was supposed to have created a trench for my leek seedlings and then continually mound up dirt around their base. This process is called "blanching," and it's done to maximize the tender white ends by letting in less light and stopping the process of photosynthesis.

Those message board comments were starting to make sense.

Is blanching necessary? No, if you don't mind anemic leeks, which is what I got.

I pictured Mr. Huge A** Leeks looking at my produce and then pulling out his super-sized specimen and proclaiming, in a Crocodile Dundee-accent despite hailing from Northern California, "That's not a leek, this is a leek."

As for my four-foot onion — which was either a green onion gone wild or a leek impersonating a bean pole — the flower (technically called an umbel) was evidence that the vegetable had "bolted" or gone to seed. Translation: The plant was going dormant and before it "died" it wanted to crank out some seeds for future generations.

Bolting happens for lots of reasons. In my case, I suspect the onion had matured ages ago, a development that escaped my notice because ... corn. The flower stalk was the plant's last-ditch effort to catch my eye.

Mission accomplished.

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