First Harvest in the New Back Yard

By Mike Davis

OK, it isn’t much. But it was a morale boost to savor my first small taste of a vegetable grown in our new garden-to-be location.

During the latter part of October 2015, I harvested the last of the larger bulblets from my Michigan crop of Egyptian walking onions. We didn’t use them all prior to purchasing our new Ohio home, so when we were there with a trailer load of household goods in the latter part of January, on a day barely above freezing, I scratched a couple dozen bulblets into a small area along the back (east) if the house and gave them what little protection I could with a few crushed oak leaves.  The “soil” there was heavy clay, with pieces of broken brick and mortar from an old landscaping job gone bad, a few tufts of persistent lawn grass, and a few nondescript weeds. These poor onions never had a chance, I thought, as they were already quite dry when planted, and days of 20-30 degrees with drying winds did them no favors.

But earlier this week, on April 3, there they were in the cracked clay, plenty to flavor a couple salads.  The taste is similar to that of chives, but somewhat sweeter and juicier.

I’ll leave most of these resilient treasures in place for now, moving them into a more favorable location as time permits after we complete our move from the Traverse City area to Beavercreek, Ohio, and begin transforming our new back yard.