Gloria arrived at our farm a couple of years ago. A neighbour had collected her from people with a large and wild flock of geese. They chased her down and bagged her up and our neighbour took her home to be company for Mr Goose, who was left bereft by the death of Mrs Goose.

Gloria, however, had other ideas. A young goose of strong mind, she soon took to the road, and ended up on our dam the next morning. It was agreed that it was too stressful for all concerned to try and catch and bag her again, so here she stayed.

She established cordial relations with the ducks, and found a particular friend in Glossy Feathers, the lone muscovy duck. For most of the year she sleeps in the duck house and shares their food, her size and attitude ensuring that she is a goose of ample proportions....but only for most of the year.

Every spring the urge comes upon her and she retires to the reeds that fringe the dam, there to press down a nest and lay eggs. She refuses to go into the duck house at night, and thereby forfeits the daily feed. She sits diligently, waiting for the eggs to hatch (which they won't, being no Mr Goose here).

We haven't seen her for several weeks now, until this morning, when a much reduced goose stood expectantly at the front door, mucky, muddy, dishevelled and thin.

When we went out she flapped her wings at us, shook her head and gobbled, and as we gave her a dish of grain she stuck her neck forward and hissed, hissed, as if to say "I'm working hard, here, I'm starving, I still don't trust you, but thanks for the grain now go away and leave me  in peace".

Which we did.

When I first began farming for fun and profit, my main priority was to keep the weeds down. I reasoned that keeping well on top of the weed situation meant that as the load of weed seed in the soil depleted, my garden would become easier to work and more efficient. 

Later,  I prioritised sowing and planting. Weed control became secondary to actually sticking plants in the dirt, because I had quickly discovered that without planting, there would be nothing to sell.

But the last year or so my priorities in the garden have changed again. Without any thought on my part, it has become apparent that harvesting is in fact the biggest priority in my (and any) commercial vegetable operation. Much as I love gardening and being surrounded by the recurring miracle of germination and growth, if I don't get an income from the garden then the business folds and that's the end of that. And I only get an income by harvesting goods for sale.

So the pragmatic list of priorities is: 1. harvesting for sale; 2. planting for the harvest; 3. watering and fertilising; 4. weed control to prevent competition, and 5. keeping things looking orderly.

In real terms the list above means that the grass in the garden is often long, and stuff is left lying around, and things go un-hoed and weedy, as I scurry around busily planting, tending and harvesting the crops. 

Ideally I would spend more time on the grass and weeds, as I do love a tidy and beautiful garden, but finding time is difficult, especially now with the spring growth and regular rain....

And the photo above? Well, the only reason I've spent four hours in the rain this morning is because harvesting is priority number one!

One bright spring morning, Farmer Alex went out to plant onions...

It’s a fine start to a tale, but today’s planting of onions seems to me more like an ending (or maybe the middle) of the real story.

Sure, I planted several thousand onion seedlings today, but this was the culmination of a process that began back in May, when I sowed the fresh onion seeds into flats of potting mix. I sowed four flats each of white, red and brown onions. Onions germinate just as well in cool conditions, so the trays sat out the front of the potting shed in the open, and once they had sprouted I applied a chook manure tea every couple of days to ensure robust seedlings.

Meanwhile, the look of the garden for the coming season took shape. Some crops are planted often (salad and rocket maybe 20 times a year), some periodically (beets seven times a year, and broccoli five-ish), and some are only planted once: garlic and onions.

Planting once usually means planting a lot. The garlic crop for this year (looking sterling, thankyouverymuch), is 25 beds, and today’s onions fill 15 beds. 

Now for the sake of neatness I like the onions to be in the same place; planting 15 beds of onions opportunistically around the garden is a nightmare for planting, harvesting and crop rotation. So freeing up a section of the garden has been a priority.

With this in mind, for the last three months I’ve been leaving one section of beds fallow once they have been cropped.

Unfortunately, a section of garden free of current cropping does not remain bare, especially in spring. Nature will fill gaps, in this case with a lovely collection of grasses, chickweed, claytonia, rocket and some dock for interest. These weeds have enjoyed the damp spring, and as cultivating wet soil is no fun (it takes longer, it’s less efficient, and bed tilth suffers), I’ve had to squeeze bed preparation into what dry days there have been. 

 On the first dry day available I ran the mower over the weeds a couple of times; then a week or so later I cultivated the patch with my trusty tiller. After a second cultivation last week, I began to spade up the beds and to rake out any remaining weeds. Because the soil is still quite damp, this took about half an hour per bed, and is fairly physical work. I then applied compost and raked that in.

As you can see, my crop planning was not perfect. In the foreground is a bed of giant italian parsley that I will be saving seed from, and beyond that is a bed of endives that I will continue to crop for at least another five weeks. The brown bits are the freshly weeded, tilled and spaded-up beds (and that's the garlic on the left). Oh well....at least the beds are finally ready.

So at last, five months later on a bright spring morning, Farmer Alex goes out to plant onions.

After making three furrows per bed, the onion seedlings are teased out of the potting mix and laid along the furrows. This year I am trialling a very close in-row spacing of 3-5 cm. The idea is that I can thin the onions progressively: first for scallions (or spring onions), then for salad onions as they mature, leaving room for full size onions by harvest time in late January and February. This way I should earn decent income for what is usually a love-crop (that is, I grow them because I want to, not because they make money!). 

You can see that two furrows of seedlings are pointing west, and one to the east. The gap on the right side of the bed makes it easier to drag the soil back over the roots of two rows with the hoe. For the row on the left, the hoe has to be shimmied under the tops of the middle row. Once that is done, I spread poppymeal fertiliser (mixed with kelp, guano, lime and gypsum) between the rows. Usually I would mix the fertiliser into the topsoil with the compost, but I have noticed that as a top-dressing, the poppymeal acts as a mulch as well as a fertilser, saving me some hoeing.

As you can see, the seedlings have perked up after being watered. As the onions grow, the poppymeal will decompose and release nutrients, so all I need to do is keep the water up to them and stay on top of weeds. 

So that’s the end of 'the tale of planting onions’....or is it the middle of ‘the story of the onion crop’?