They Might Be Giants

As I'm nearing the end of the book I'm reading right now - Backyard Giants by Susan Warren (review forthcoming on Gardening By the Book) - I'm already thinking ahead to next year's growing season.  Even though I grow mostly perennials and ornamentals, we do put out a vegetable garden, too. In fact, we've always put out a vegetable garden, even when I wasn't a serious gardener.

Backyard Giants is the story of the business of growing giant pumpkins. Over 1500-lb. pumpkins.  It's a hugely competitive activity and a lot of expense and effort goes into trying to grow the world's largest pumpkin. It got me thinking.  What if I paid even half as much attention to growing something in my garden as these pumpkin growers do?

I'm not talking about spending lots of money, nor am I talking about growing exclusively one thing in any kind of quest to grow the largest, the heaviest, the prettiest, etc.  But if I paid more attention to the needs of say, my onions, perhaps I'd get nicer onions. Yeah, my onions...

I grew red ones this year. Don't ask me the variety, because right now I couldn't tell you. But they're good and sweet and I just chopped up a few to put in my chili, and next year, I want to grow more of them and find some way to grow them larger. I've never been able to grow onions like most people. But I know part of the reason is my own fault. I simply put the onion starts in the ground and let nature do its thing. No fertilizer, besides compost, and sometimes not even that. I just don't do anything to help them out.

I get decent onions, most of them about the right size for using in recipes, if I use two of them. But I'd still like to grow onions like you can buy in the store. Not the softball-sized ones, but baseball-sized would be nice. So I think that will be one of my goals for next year - to figure out how to grow bigger onions. Maybe just fertilizing will do the trick. Or maybe there's something else...

In the style of the giant pumpkin growers - any and all advice is welcomed!