Kitchen Garden Forum

I'm halfway through an interesting book I found in our library called "A Green and Pleasant Land - How England's Gardeners fought the Second World War" by Ursula Buchan, which details the efforts made to get gardeners and allotment holders growing more fruit and vegetables.

It,s full of interesting information which shows how vegetable gardening has changed since those days ,especially some of the methods used for killing bugs and diseases . I knew for example that onions were in acute short supply during the war as most of them were imported and that came to a halt at the beginning od the war but didn,t know for example that onion sets were not available then and that all onions had to be grown from seed. That must have made it a much more laborious process and explains perhaps why they were in such short supply. I don't know how many of us these days do that when we can take the short cut of planting onion sets.l

That is interesting Primrose. Perhaps onions weren't thought of as an essential so most of the farmland went to cereals and potatoes etc.

I sometimes grow onions from seeds just for a change of variety as the sets are a bit limited. They are very easy and don't seem to run to seed as much as the sets - even heat treated ones- and it is easy to sow too many as there aren't many germination failures so I don't think productivity would be a problem.

Thank you Primrose for this recommendation - it does look an interesting read, and I've just reserved it at my local library - I'm really looking forward to reading it.

I was curious about the lack of wartime onions so I found out my other half's grandma's booklet called 'Potato Pete'. Full of endless wartime potato recipes including a sandwich spread! And there is no mention of bulb onions at all but they do use ' a chopped spring onion' quite often so seed must have been more readily available.

MW