Damn, Gina!

We've been doing the whole home garden thing for a few years, now.

Our first years were with a raised bed in the back yard. We built it from several lengths of pressure-treated 4x4 lumber and a lot of gardening soil from Hollywoods & Vines. Our friend, Keith, came over with his radial saw and helped us cut the lumber so we could make the boxes from it. The first several years produced modest harvests of peppers, beans, tomatoes, strawberries, chard, onions and cucumbers. The cucumbers were frequently disasters; the strawberries never survived the birds and only a small number of tomatoes survived the squirrels; onions almost never survived Puckett. But, what we got was still nice. Oh... And the peppers were brutally hot - even the normally tame banana peppers would be volcanic. The modicum of success we had always made us want to do more, but, between the shadiness of the back yard and the presence of diggy dogs, it wasn't terribly practical to do so.

Two seasons ago, Donna decided to try doing "companion planting". Specifically, she started planting onions amongst the roses (out in the front yard). The first harvests were small - both in the number and size of the resulting onions. But, like what grew in the back yard, they were a very tasty supplement to what we otherwise bought from the local farmers' markets.

Tonight, we just had some of this year's onions. This years crop has been considerably larger both in the number of onions produced and in the size of those onions. Interestingly, much like the hot peppers, our onions are very strong. I can tell when Donna's cutting these onions up, clear from the opposite end of the house. Donna finds that they manage to overcome the protection of her onion-chopping glasses. And, once placed in the chopped-onion container, every time you open the lid, a bloom of assertive onion essence comes billowing out, stinging the eyes and lighting up the nose. They are strong.

Whatever it is about how we grow onions and peppers, they are just much more potently flavored than any we get at the farmers' markets and ridiculously moreso than ones we used to get at the grocery stores.