Food that grows underground – potatoes, onions, carrots – is one of life’s great mysteries, as far as I can tell. The green part above ground might be interesting and may add some nice foliage to the garden, but for the novice gardener who’s really interested in what’s going on below ground, the plants can be an enigma.
The biggest question seems to be the hardest to answer without killing the plant prematurely – when you plant these vegetables, how can you tell when they’re ready to harvest?
Garden columnist Keith Muraoka addresses one of these mysteries this week by discussing when garlic is ready to pick, meaning I can now scratch that off my list of puzzling underground foods.
But what happens if you leave these foods in the ground too long? Does the vegetable/bulb/tuber just keep getting bigger until you have an underground monstrosity? Or do you have a small harvest window before they eventually rot away?
These are the questions that plague me as I wander down the path in my garden, where I’ve got some red onions that may or may not be ready to pick.
According to a gardening book I have, the tops of the onions will fall over and they should be that way for about a week before they are ready to harvest. Well, about a month ago, the top of one of the onions I planted fell over or was smashed by my dog.
I wasn’t sure which happened, and the part of the bulb that stuck up above the ground was really small, so I just left them there.
The part of the bulb that sticks up above ground is now quite a bit bigger on that plant, but now I’m not sure if I’ve left them in too long. I don’t know how representative that little piece that sticks up is of the rest of the onion – is it like an iceberg, where the part above water is only a tenth or so of what’s below? In that case, I’ve got a few enormous onions I need to pull up.
Perhaps I got a little too ambitious by venturing into below-ground plants when I have enough trouble with the ones that do all their business above ground. I think maybe I’ll follow Keith’s example and plant some garlic, which is ready to harvest when most of the leaves have turned brown – I have plenty of experience with that.
