Front yard onions, Part 2: Installation

When people who are not familiar with our cul-de-sac walk by and see this...

...they often produce facial expressions that look a lot like these...

I sit in my front office and see their looks of surprise and delight as they stroll by and I always have a camera at the ready, but it wouldn't be polite for me to publish their actual faces, so I hope you don't mind these substitutes above.  You get the general idea from them. 

Anyway, people continue to enjoy the stacked stone, even though we're not nearly finished building the whole front yard out.  Hopefully folks will get an opportunity to enjoy the next part of the grow ops, because we installed our winter onions this past weekend.

And we're trying a new thing with these - using a hose-end drip line to irrigate them.  Either we'll screw it up and they'll get root rot, or they'll grow really nicely, I don't know which.  I didn't want to consider any kind of permanent irrigation until I had a chance to learn whether the temporary knock-off would work for this kind of application. 

I think they'll look very fine once they start filling out the bed.  It ought to be very Zen, a bunch of stick straight bright green plants on a grid in the middle of winter when everything is usually brown and decrepit. 

The lines have tiny holes that let water drip out according to a battery-operated timer's schedule.  Very efficient. 

Of course, I can't close this post without mentioning Hermine and Tom, a husband and wife team who sued the village of Miami Shores two days ago after being forced by same to tear out their front yard vegetable garden.

"Oh look, honey!!  Two older Americans on TV who are not dying of obesity-related comorbidities!!  My God, could that have something to do with the fact that they keep physically active in their yard and eat the healthy stuff that they grow??"

Screengrab courtesy Miami Herald. 

Apparently Miami Shores didn't get the memo about how strong-arming homesteaders to stop homesteading is the Kiss of Death in the court of public opinion, and maybe even in the court of law.  This is yet another in a long line of local skirmishes that have led to national news coverage and widespread backlash.  The most any code-enforcer is ever going to accomplish in these cases is to compel some kind of minimum aesthetic standard.  That'll certainly stop short of pricey Oklahoma chopped sandstone, but it might exceed bare black weed cloth. 

Anyway, my thanks to the two neighborhood children who helped me harvest the sweet potatoes and the six children who helped me install these one hundred onions in their place.  Hopefully our hose-end experiment will succeed and we'll be able to grow enough for all.