Aromatic alliums

and other great gifts from the earth

Daffodils brighten the rainiest, gloomiest days

Mother Nature magic—plant it and it will grow. I love walking around a neighbourhood and seeing what gardeners are up to, expressing their take on beauty, their personalities and preferences, with every spadeful of mulch and dirt. We’re so lucky having a house to live in, those of us who do, and a yard to play in, for kids of all ages. And the freedom to pretty much plant whatever we want.

Dennis and I are in total agreement: we’d much rather eat than mow grass. So our whole sun-filled front yard we give over to growing edibles: tomatoes, beans, beets, carrots. Lettuce, kale and other greens galore. And onions. We always start with onions, best planted in cool conditions, so our first gardening project come spring.

Buying Dutch sets from the local farmers’ coop. Treating the soil with a trailer load of nitrogen-rich compost from sheep-farming friends. Tilling it in as soon as we can—have to maintain harmony with down-wind neighbours!—then getting out stakes and string and starting to plant. Arugula, spinach and lettuce for spacers and fillers—they like cool temperatures, too. And then those cute baby globes, three inches apart, marching down the furrows. Six rows in total by the time we were done.

Enough cooking onions for us all year, in casseroles, curries, stir-fries, French onion soup. The bushel we still have from last year’s crop will keep us going till these little guys grow up in late summer.

Some unfortunate folks are sensitive or even highly allergic, but onions are really good for the rest of us, experts claim. Anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, with anti-oxidants beneficial for cardiovascular and immune systems. The whole allium family, including leeks, garlic, chives and shallots, supports health with their sulphur compounds, not to mention potassium, quercetin, manganese, iron, and vitamins C and B6. Dennis and I enjoy them for the taste.

Onions were prized in China way back in 5000 BC, being easily stored and transported. For their spherical shape, Egyptians considered them a symbol of eternal life, and used them in mummification practices. European settlers took alliums everywhere they went around the globe.

I’ve been snipping Chinese chives into salads since our patch started growing three weeks ago, happily impervious to snow and frost. About that same time, the wild leeks in the woods behind our house appeared, welcome mats of green on the forest floor. Dennis has had an aversion to leeks since childhood on the family farm, when cows grazing in the sugar bush would eat wild leeks in early spring, with unpleasant olfactory results. So we happily stick to onions, garlic and chives, glad for the flavour they add to everything else we harvest from the garden.

Looking over the chives to the onion patch

Dutch sets, start of a row

and end of a row

Ready for tucking in to bed

and starting to grow

Enough left from last year to feed us through summer

Most tender now and tasty all summer, these perennial chives produce white globe blossoms that bees and other pollinators love to nectar on.

A feast of native fiddleheads growing wild in our side yard

Garlic growing at my friend Dianne’s, source of our annual supply

And her Egyptian onions

Wild leeks in the woods behind the house