The Great Onion Curing Blueprint

 Well, if you read last week's post you'll know our onions came up out of the ground looking absolutely champion. What I didn't know then was that within a few days I'd be stood in the greenhouse doorway with a thermometer in my hand, sweating like a man who's just been asked to explain his own accounts, wondering whether I'd accidentally built a pizza oven instead of a greenhouse.

Because this week, ladies and gentlemen, we have had a heatwave. Not your polite British heatwave either, where everyone gets a bit pink and complains about the trains. A proper one. The greenhouse thermometer hit fifty-five degrees Celsius on Tuesday afternoon, which is a temperature I associate with saunas, not seed trays. Fifty-five degrees. My tomatoes looked personally offended.

So the onions, bless them, were not going anywhere near it.

Iris Takes Charge

This is where our Iris stepped in and, not for the first time, showed more sense than her old dad. I'll be honest, my first instinct was to just leave them on the wire rack in the greenhouse and hope for the best, because that's what we always do and I'm a creature of habit. Iris took one look at the thermometer, then one look at me, and said something along the lines of "you are not cooking those onions, Dad." Which, fair enough.

Instead, she's laid every single one of them straight out on the lawn. Nice dry patch of grass, out the way of the washing line, in full sun but with a gentle breeze getting underneath them. Onions in a single layer, none of them touching, roots facing one way, tops the other, like a little army lying down for a rest. She turns them once a day so they dry evenly all the way round, and brings them in if there's even a whisper of rain forecast, because a wet onion is a sorry, soft, sorry-for-itself onion, and nobody wants that.

It looked a bit odd, I'll admit, walking out to hang the washing out and finding forty onions sunbathing where the paddling pool used to go. But do you know what, it's worked an absolute treat. Better airflow than the greenhouse was ever going to manage in this heat, and none of that risk of them starting to cook in their own skins, which I'm fairly convinced is a real danger at fifty-five degrees. I'm no scientist, but I know when to trust my daughter over my own habits, and this was one of those times.

Why Curing Matters (And Why It's Not Just Drying)

Now, for anyone new to growing their own, "curing" onions might sound like something you'd only need a doctor for, but it's simply the process of letting the outer skins dry and toughen up properly before you store them. It's the single most important step between "onion in the ground" and "onion still good for eating at Christmas," and it's the bit most people rush or skip entirely, usually to their cost.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start out: a freshly pulled onion is basically still a bit alive and a bit damp, and if you just chuck it straight in a box in the shed, it'll rot on you within weeks. Curing dries out the neck of the onion and the outer layers of skin, sealing everything up nice and tight like a little edible parcel, which is what lets it keep for months rather than days.

A few simple rules if you fancy having a go yourself:

• Pull your onions once the tops have naturally fallen over and started to brown off. Don't be tempted to bend the tops over yourself to force the issue — let nature do it in her own time.
• Get them off the soil and into a dry spot as soon as you can. Ground contact and dampness are an onion's worst enemies at this stage.
• Give them airflow from all sides. A single layer, not a heap. Onions piled on top of each other in a bucket will sweat, and sweating leads to rotting, and rotting leads to a very disappointed gardener.
• Keep them out of the rain, but don't panic about a bit of shade if the sun's fierce. Warm and breezy beats blazing and airless every time, as we've just learned the hard way.
• It generally takes anywhere from one to three weeks, depending on the weather, until the outer skins are properly papery and the necks have gone thin and dry rather than thick and green.

You'll know they're ready because they'll rustle. Honestly, there's a lovely little sound an onion makes when you pick it up once it's cured properly, a dry, papery rustle, and once you've heard it a few times you'll never mistake a half-cured onion for a finished one again.

What Happens Next — The Plaiting

Once Iris reckons they've had enough sunbathing and the necks have gone properly dry and thin, the next job is one of my favourites of the whole onion year, and that's the plaiting.

Iris and I sit ourselves down in the shed doorway with a stool each, a pot of tea within arm's reach, and a great pile of onions between us, and we plait them up by their dried tops into long strings, same as you'd plait hair, if hair smelled quite so strongly and made your eyes water on a bad day. You start with three good strong-necked onions, cross the tops over each other, then keep working more onions into the plait as you go, weaving them in tight so the whole thing holds together under its own weight. It sounds fiddly written down like that, but once you've got the rhythm of it, it's a proper pleasure, sat there natter­ing away while your hands just get on with it.

We hang the finished plaits up in the shed, well away from any damp, and they'll happily see us through the winter, one onion pulled off the string at a time as we need them. There's something deeply satisfying about walking into the shed in November and just reaching up for your dinner, rather than trekking to the shops in the rain. It's proper old-fashioned frugal living, that — no plastic bags, no waste, and every onion earning its keep right up until you eat it.

If plaiting isn't your thing, or you haven't got the patience for it (Sam certainly hasn't, he lasted about four onions before wandering off to "check on something" that definitely didn't need checking), you can just as easily store cured onions in old tights or net bags hung up somewhere cool and dry, with a knot tied between each one so if one starts to go, it doesn't take its neighbours down with it. Either way, the principle's the same: cool, dry, and plenty of air.

A Nod to Sara

Sara, meanwhile, has already been raiding a few of the less-perfect ones for the freezer, chopped and bagged up ready for winter stews and soups. Not every onion needs to be a prize-winning show onion destined for a plait in the shed — some of the smaller or slightly bruised ones are perfectly happy having a second career as a frozen contribution to a Tuesday dinner time casserole, and that's just as valuable in my book. Nothing goes to waste around here if Sara's got anything to do with it.

So there you have it — the great onion curing blueprint, heatwave edition. A lawn full of sunbathing onions, one very sensible seventeen-year-old, and a shed full of plaits to look forward to. If you're growing your own this year, get them cured properly and you'll be thanking yourself in the depths of winter when everyone else is buying soft, sprouting onions from the supermarket and you're pulling a beautiful golden one straight off your own string.

Right, that's your lot from us. Onions cooling their heels on the lawn, a plaiting session on the horizon, and a greenhouse thermometer I'm still not quite over.

Happy growing, everyone. See you on the plot.