Front yard onions, Part 1: The prep

One of the neighborhood children came up to me yesterday and announced that I needed to plant more stuff.  He and the other kids were running out of things to work on in my existing inventory, and given that none of them had fruit trees or vegetable gardens in their own yards, his view was that I really ought to expand mine. 

He got part of his wish today as we prepared our front stacked stone bed for the winter crop of onions.  This is what it looked like prior to our harvest of sweet potatoes, which are roughly clustered in the center of the bed, flanked by ornamentals. 

Remember the things I said in the May 2013 post titled "Front yard vegetable garden".  If you are going to raise food in your front yard, you need to follow some rules of aesthetics.  You can get away with most anything in your own back yard, but a front yard garden needs to look presentable at all times.  Ornamental flowers really help with that.  It's mid-November and I still have flowers blooming. 

Little hands make light work (and blurry photos).  Nothing sounds as heartwarming as the surprised shriek of a child who hauls his first big honkin' sweet potato out of the earth. 

This is what we pulled out of the front yard so far (I'll probably find more when I compost and till the soil in preparation for the onions).  It'll be enough to share with my young harvesters and their friends and families in time for Thanksgiving.   

Having cleared the sweet potatoes and their vines, I then neem'd the bed to put the run on any ants prior to our pending onion installation.

Here's what the baby onion transplants look like as I purchased them from Faith's Garden Shed - Texas 1015 and red creole respectively.  Little onions grow into big onions.  I don't think the kids quite get that yet. 

Stay tuned for the installation part.  We're planning to incorporate a new experiment with that this year.