Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi, I am new to this forum but not to the Kitchen Garden Mag. In the July edition there was a picture of the 'Father/Son' article showing their Onions which has what appeared o be circular tubing supports. I have tried all the catalogs, but I could be asking the wrong question.

I would dearly love to obtain some of these. This is only my second year of growing veg and I seem to have had some success with my onions, but the foilage has drooped and spread over the surounding path.

Anyone help.
Many thanks
Teressa

Hello Teressa
Is it the brown tubes in the middle picture on page 49 of the August mag that you mean?
The plants at the back there are leeks and these tubes are used to blanch the stems. The tubes help to keep the stem in the dark so that you get a good length of white stem on your leek plant. The tubes look to me like lengths of the 110mm drainage or soil pipe that builders use. You can get this at your local builders yard like Travis Perkins, Jewsons or the DIY sheds like B&Q and Homebase. It comes in 3 metre lengths but is easily cut to size. Some of these places will cut wood and might even cut this stuff for you.
Its not suitable for onions though as you don't need a length a blanched stem. The best way that I've found of supporting larger floppy onions is to use that rigid wide mesh plastic netting that's sold as a wall support for clematis. Just cut it the right size and tie it round to form a tube. The onion leaves can then be easily threaded through the mesh. Most onions seem to manage pretty well even if they flop over and I only use a support for the few plants that I want to get really big bulbs from.

Hope this helps

John

Welcome to the forum TAL, and i think John has hit every nail on the head with utter precision.

Many thanks John. It appears I mistook the veg being supported. Thanks for the tip about the wire mesh. Really feeling my way.

Teressa

I must confess, I find weeding amongst onions a big pain because I cram everything closely together and the stems are really fragile if you try to tread amongst them and are easily knocked over. After a long absence of growing them, I did grow them again this year and a visiting duck waddled through them and damaged every stem. If I grow them next year I think I'll get some of the wide squared rigid plastic netting and support it on bricks at either end of the row and let the stems poke through. Is there any evidence that onions grow at a slower rate once the stems have been bent/damaged?