Echalote Grise Update


It's still early days as far as my echalote grise allotment experiment is concerned, but already there's a noticeable difference between my shop bought and seed varieties.

The ones on the left of the photo are the sets I bought. Their growth is much more spidery in appearance and it looks like they're shaping up to give me lots of new shallots. To the right are the shop bought ones and their growth is much more onion-like. I suspect I'll be getting fewer shallots per bulb. Whether they're also much larger remains to be seen.

The picture shows another allotment experiment I'm trying this year. Despite the plentiful rain we had last month and for most of this one, the recent dry weather has taken the allotment back into really parched mode. So I'm trying out mulching around my crops with grass clippings to retain as much moisture as I can.

I saw this being used a lot at Glendale, a fantastic garden I visited on Vancouver Island last year and as they also train up Master Gardeners there, it looked not only a good thing to try, it's also a good way of making use of all my grass clippings. It's easy to push them back when I want to water everything and should also help to keep the weeds at bay. Fingers crossed they don't became a haven for slugs though!

Comments

  1. Lucy Corrander Now in Halifax!29 May 2012 at 07:15

    Only this morning, I was wondering why slugs don't like grass as much as they like to eat other plants - though it was the growing kind I was thinking of. They do seem to hang out in grass once it's cut. . but maybe not when it's thinly enough spread that it doesn't retain moisture . . . interesting. Good luck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. VP29 May 2012 at 07:35

    Lucy - they certainly hide under the grass round the edges of my allotment, so I fear I've given them a nice sheltered pathway to my shallots! Time for a slug hunt methinks!

    ReplyDelete
  3. VP29 May 2012 at 13:13

    Linda Penny via her email subscription (which comes through to me as an email rather than a comment on the blog) says:

    Lovely post

    Thanks Linda!

    ReplyDelete
  4. easygardener29 May 2012 at 20:58

    I have read that they are best grown from seed - you get more shallots. I did grow them once from sets but they seemed reluctant to divide so it was rather disappointing.
    BTW - the Hakonechloa is pretty flat to start with so with or without a cat it looks much the same :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. VP17 June 2012 at 20:22

    EG - we'll see what happens!

    ReplyDelete

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