[Wombat18]

Finally got all mine in, including the ones I should have planted last autumn.  My soil is heavy clay so I tried something I was told about last year - make a deep hole, fill the bottom with sand, put the onion/shallot/garlic in and top up with compost.  It's supposed to improve drainage.  Time will tell, I expect.

[Christine]

There are frost pockets that are not lifting till mid afternoon on my plot at the moment though most of it is in the sun. Also it hasn't really dried out decently so I'm going away for three days and will look at planting out onions when I get back. We've had frost six days out of the last seven so it's not that warm.

Everything is ready to go so it's just a case of actually planting them. Which is the easy bit. Even the weeds are making no great effort at the moment so it's obviously not quite the growing season.

[bigben]

Christine - your right about the weeds - I noticed that as a sign that the season was not ready yet, as few of my weeds have started to show their heads. I am going to leave it another week at least before I get my onions in.

[Debz]

I haven't planted my onions yet because I still can't see the soil.  We still have snow on the ground from 10 days ago because it keeps freezing at night to a solid block.  The sun is out today so maybe by the end of the week I will be able to have a look at the soil.

[DD.]

Ground again rock hard here this morning.

Can you pop your location into your profile, Dabz? It does help when talking about regional variations in climate.

[madcat]

Shallots went in yesterday but the onion sets are going to have to wait.  Their bed is still hard with frost - OH went to put a fork in and it just bounced right back! 

The onions being grown from seed sulked for ages but are now showing ....  I think they needed the longer days to be convinced.

[Zippy]

Onion sets went in last weekend. I stripped off a swathe of green manure (winter tares), hoed through the roots (no digging needed) and plugged the onion sets in while the first three inches were still crumbly from the hoeing, then the green manure was replaced as a mulch to keep the morning frost away a bit and to stop frosted soil from heaving the sets back out.

It will take a while for the sets to take root; meanwhile the green manure roots are rotting down in the soil top layer and releasing their nitrogen.

The top mulch also seems to confuse the birds from tugging on the onion tips and stops cats from using the bed as a latrine.