Medwyn Williams is potting up his shallots!
Forget the Boxing Day sales, I’ll be busy potting up crops in the polytunnel
Once I get the turkey and mince pies out of my system I’ll have a walk around on the land to make sure the leeks and onions are still growing away with no apparent problems. Growing for exhibition at the highest level is unrelenting, the plants don’t know or even care that it’s Christmas and they still need attention to watering. This is a duty that Alwyn my son and I will share over the festive season, with Alwyn probably bearing the brunt of it!
One job I always carry out between Christmas and the New Year is to start my shallots off in pots on a bench in the polytunnel. I just hope they’re in good condition after my initial losses. Shallots are certainly notorious bad keepers. Even though I thoroughly dry them out in the polytunnel during the summer months, some still rot away.
As I pot the shallots up I check them over, removing any loose skins and trimming off the neck. I remove the empty, dried, old stem close to the shoulder to allow the emerging growth easy access. I pot them into 9cm (3½in) pots using some Levington M3 potting compost and give a light watering. There’s no need to soak them as they’ll have enough moisture within the bulbs themselves to keep them going.
I’ll then place the pots on a bench I’ve lined with capillary matting in the bottom section of the polytunnel as this area is double skinned and gives reasonable frost protection.
At the same time I’ll also pot up my pickling shallots. I’ll plant these out in March into the freestanding steel containers that gave me so much aggravation through the growing season this year. As I wrote before, the containers never had enough drainage in them and that has now been remedied by drilling much larger holes in the bottom.