Know your onions

Spent a calm hour this weekend sat in the sunshine picking over the trays of stored onions and shallots.  Last year's harvest was mammoth, at one point in sunny August I had three large wire panels strewn with hundreds of bulbs in the courtyard.  Any which looked slightly soft around the neck were eaten straight away as this is a good indicator that they won't keep.  The rest were stored in trays on my vegetable rack in the farm pantry, which is a cool airy building which doubles as the camp site information and storage room during the summer.

So this weekend I checked the harvest, trimmed any leftover wiry roots and peeled off the top muddy layers of papery skin to reveal the rich colour of the onions and shallots.