Garden Log

Continuing with the garden catalogs, today we look at onions.

Yellow Onions

  • Candy* 85 days to harvest. Sweet, moderately pungent, short storage, day-neutral yellow. A hybrid day length neutral yellow cooking onion that can be spring seeded in all areas of the U.S. It is less pungent than other cooking types and will store well if properly cured.
  • Prince* 105 days to harvest. Fusarium wilt resistant. Long storage, high yields. Big onions for long storage. A beautiful, big onion, among the most widely grown varieties in the North. The large, blocky, globe-shaped bulbs are uniform with vigorous tops that finish off to a thin, well-dried neck. Yellow skins have a distinct satiny sheen and adhere well in storage. From the same talented breeder as our enormously popular Copra, Prince is larger and stores nearly, but not quite, as well.
  • Copra* 107 days to harvest. Fusarium wilt resistant. Pink root rot resistant. Agway Seedway Uniform round, high yields, pungent. Uniform, “rock-hard” storage onion with early maturity. These medium-sized, dark yellow-skinned storage onions have the preferred blocky round shape with thin necks that dry quickly. Firmness and skin are superior. Unrivaled in our yearly storage trials, remaining firm and sound after other varieties have sprouted. Highest in sugar (13°-14°) of the storage onions.
  • Ailsa Craig or Kelsae 110 days to harvest. Moderately sweet. This popular English heirloom onion is renowned for producing exhibition-size 2 lb. globe-shaped onions even in areas with shorter, cooler growing seasons. The huge bulbs have straw yellow skin and sweet, firm white flesh. A long-day sweet Spanish type that stores quite well.
  • Walla Walla Sweet 125 days to harvest. Truly sweet; seed or plant as early as possible. Big flattened bulbs with mild, sweet flesh. The only truly sweet and mild onion for long summer days in the northern two-thirds of the country. Brought to Washington state from Corsica around the turn of the century. Yellow skin; white, juicy flesh. Not a winter keeper.

Red Onions

  • Mars* 110 days to harvest. Bright red throughout; large bulbs, high yields. Early and big. An outstanding variety that matures early and makes nice, big, round red onions. Good purple-red skin color, and well-colored interior.

White Onions

  • Super Star* 100 days to harvest. Pink root rot resistant. White skin and flesh, sweet to moderately pungent; not for storage. This first hybrid onion ever to win an AAS award, Super Star will wow you! The jumbo white globes can reach over a pound apiece, and are simply crammed with thick, mild-sweet rings. Good skin retention means better storage capability, and great resistance to pink root ensures healthier plants! But the real secret of Super Star’s performance is that it’s neither a long- nor a short-day type. Instead, it’s a “mid-day” or day-neutral variety, which means that it can be grown almost anywhere in the contiguous U.S., from the far north to the deep south. And Super Star not only grows, it flourishes! Earlier, larger, and more flavorful than most long- or short-day types, it is out-of-this-world delicious!

Bunching Onions

  • Long White Summer Bunching 60 days to harvest. Fusarium wilt resistant. Pink root rot resistant. Mild, for scallions, can be overwintered. An improved White Spear or Nebuka type. White shafts are 5 to 7 inches long, full, upright, dark green, non bulbing. An elite scallion.
  • Deep Purple 60 days to harvest. Deep red stems. The only red buncher that is highly colored at any temperature or age. Spring or summer sowing.
  • Feast 68 days to harvest. Early blight or alternaria leaf spot resistant. An improved Tokyo Long White type with tolerance to Downy Mildew and Alternaria Leaf Spot. A single stalk type, upright plant habit 16- to 20-inch long white shafts, dark green leaves. Not winter hardy.

December 21

Happy <dfn title="The point in the ecliptic at which the sun is farthest south from the equator, namely, the first point of the sign Capricorn in northern latitudes; &mdash; so called because the sun then apparently stands still in its southward motion.">Winter Solstice</dfn>.

Stacey’s Cafe – Pleasanton California

<a href="http://www.staceyscafe.com/dinnermenu.htm" title="Stacey's Cafe - Pleasanton California">Stacey&rsquo;s Cafe - Pleasanton California</a>: &ldquo;No matter how finicky you are, our servers are trained to resist the urge to slap you senseless. Feel free to ask for changes to your meal. We can add garlic, delete spices, remove meat if you&rsquo;re a vegetarian &mdash; whatever change you like &mdash; as long as it&rsquo;s legal. And if no one is watching, we&rsquo;re flexible on the legal thing too.&rdquo;

Dilberito: Why?

<a href="http://www.dilberito.com/why.htm" title="Dilberito: Why?">Dilberito: Why?</a>: &ldquo;Founded in 1998 by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert&trade;, and Jack Parker, food research and development veteran, Scott Adams Foods plans to make waves in the food industry. &lsquo;Quite simply, we want to change the way people eat,&rsquo; says Scott Adams, CEO. &lsquo;Scott Adams Foods started as a personal quest to find foods that were nutritious, fast and easy to make, and most important, taste great. When I found that it was impossible to find anything like that, I knew that we could do something to make the world a better place, and make some money in the process. It&rsquo;s called enlightened capitalism.&lsquo;



&ldquo;Scott Adams is enjoying creating a corporation modeled after tenets set forth in his best-selling book, The Dilbert Principle: Create a vision, hire good people, then get out of the way. True to his word, Adams created the vision for the company and hired one of the best minds in the food industry, Jack Parker, to run the operation. The company&rsquo;s first creation was the DILBERITO &mdash; a delicious handheld meal fortified with 100% Daily Value of 23 essential vitamins and minerals.&rdquo;

Dweezil makes a brisket

<a href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/food/la-fo-dweezil17dec17,0,6522764.story?coll=sfla-home-dots-right-utility" title="Sun-Sentinel: Food">Sun-Sentinel: Food</a>: &ldquo;Beginning Jan. 16, [Lisa Loeb, the petite pop songstress with the cat-eye glasses, and Dweezil Zappa, the guitarist son of rock music legend Frank Zappa,] will star in their own Food Network show, &lsquo;Dweezil and Lisa.&rsquo; Last summer, they filmed 10 episodes of the weekly half-hour food travelogue, in which they visit restaurants, ask experts about their favorite foods and get cooking lessons from Tarbell, chef at Tarbell&rsquo;s in Phoenix, and Scott Conant, the chef at L&rsquo;Impero in New York.&rdquo;

Coffee fuelled the information exchanges of the 17th and 18th centuries

<a href="http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2281736" title="Economist.com |  Coffee-houses">Coffee-houses</a>: &ldquo;Where do you go when you want to know the latest business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with political gossip, find out what others think of a new book, or stay abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments? Today, the answer is obvious: you log on to the internet. Three centuries ago, the answer was just as easy: you went to a coffee-house. There, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could read the latest pamphlets, catch up on news and gossip, attend scientific lectures, strike business deals, or chat with like-minded people about literature or politics.&rdquo;

Food Log

No real breakfast or lunch today, though I did sample Gretchen&rsquo;s holiday cookies throughout the day and I had a cup of Mint Green Tea. Gretchen and I made turkey noodle soup for dinner, Gretchen made popovers to go with it. I also had two glasses of <a href="http://www.bolla.com/view_wine.asp?nWID=8" title="Bolla Wines of Italy - Open Up">Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon</a>.

The Tomato Page

<a href="http://erik.nerim.net/tomato/faq.htm">The Tomato Page - FAQ</a>: &ldquo;Cleaning up my kitchen once, a long time ago, I discovered that I had three or four different brands of canned tomato paste. And it actually were nice-looking cans. So instead of putting them back in the cupboard, I decided to put them on a shelf. Shortly afterwards I noticed again different cans in a supermarket. I guess that at that moment I started to collect.&rdquo;

Low-carb diets are catching on, to dismay of bread- and pasta-makers.

<a href="http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/7430619.htm" title="Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/07/2003 | In Atkins era, sandwich is no hero">In Atkins era, sandwich is no hero</a>: &rdquo;Avoiding bread, pasta and potatoes at what food experts say is an astonishing rate, many Americans are evangelically fixated on the low-carbohydrate dining espoused by diets such as Atkins and South Beach. Depending on the estimate, between nine million and 35 million people are following all or some of the tenets of a high-protein, low-carb eating regimen.&rdquo;

Food Log

No breakfast this morning. I weighed in at 158 pounds. Lunch was Panda Buffet&rsquo;s orange chicken on chow mien with hot and sour soup and a small sierra mist. I walked downtown to get Gretchen&rsquo;s watch from the jeweler and stopped by the HUB for lunch, then walked back &mdash; maybe three miles round trip. When I got back, I had a candy cane that our administrative assistant was giving out to everybody before the holiday break.



<ins datetime="2003-12-19T18:52:00-05:00">Dinner was a Caesar salad and two Beck&rsquo;s Dark Beers. We are making cookies for the holidays&mdash; and sampling as we go. The first sample was a cherry walnut bar cookie. Yum. <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/smile.png" height="18" width="18" alt=":-)" /> We also made spritz, oatmeal, refrigerator cookies, and pecan crisps.</ins>