Front yard onion progress

November 21, 2013:

Numerous neighborhood children helped me plant the slips, which were about the size of toothpicks.  Pic from this post which described the installation. 

January 20, 2014:

Freshly weeded and watered.  They get a lot of wind in this location, which tends to knock them around. 

We are cautiously optimistic that this crop is actually going to fully develop.  This past weekend, I put about 30 minutes of weeding and fertilizing effort into it, really the first work I had done since planting.

Soils here are chronically yucky, so I fortified with some cotton burr compost. 

Sprinkle some on top...

...work it in. 

I also added a little blood meal to bring up the nitrogen content.

It's not as nasty as it sounds.  Nitrogen augmentation is commonly recommended on sites such as this one and I've probably been remiss in not doing it sooner, although I did fertilize extensively using Microlife at the time of planting. 

The only other effort I've put into this crop thus far (with it being on an automatic drip irrigation system) was to cover it a few weeks ago when we had the hard freeze.  Other than that, it hasn't really been asking for much.  Fingers crossed that things continue to go well.

Some of our neighbors asked us why we didn't put up Christmas lights during the holidays.  My husband and I were both working large numbers of oddly-timed shifts, and we never got around to it.  But we did put the lights under the sheets that kept the onions warm during the freeze. 

And it looks like we'll be doing the same thing again this evening as a winter storm warning has been issued.