molly mooching 81small, flat Italian favorite called “Borretana cipollini.” I was anticipating
our family’s needs, knowing I would not be purchasing vegetables from
the grocery store next winter. Two onions per week seemed reasonable.
Onion plants can take a light frost, so they don’t have to wait until the
full safety of late spring. Their extreme sensitivity is to day length: “short
day” onions like Vidalias, planted in autumn in the deep South, are trig-
gered to fatten into bulbs when day length reaches about ten hours, in
May or so. By contrast, “long day” onions are planted in spring in the
north, as early as the ground thaws so they’ll have enough growth under
their belts to make decent- sized bulbs when triggered to do so by the
fi fteen- hour days of a northern- latitude high summer. If you didn’t re-
alize onion farmers had to be this scientific about what varieties they
plant, that’s just the start. They’re also required by law to live within a
seventeen-county area centered on Vidalia, Georgia, in order to sell you a
Vidalia onion, or in the Walla- Walla, Washington, region to print “Walla
Walla Sweets” on the bag. French wine growers are not the only farmers
who can market the subtleties of soil and climate, the things that trans-
late into the regionally specifi c flavor they call terroir. The flavor of an on-
ion, like that of a wine grape, is influenced by climate, soil chemistry,
even soil microbes. It’s surely true of other vegetables, or would be, if we
knew enough of our own local flavors to recognize them.
The earliest plantings are onions, potatoes, peas, and the cole crops
(broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts are all the same
genus and species). All these do well in cool weather and don’t mind a
few weeks of frost, or even snow on their heads. Broccoli buds will start to
pop up above their leaves in the last cool days of May. In the same weather,
snap peas twine up their trellises lightning fast and set their pods. Along
with rosy new potatoes and green onions pulled early from bed, these will
be the first garden proceeds, with asparagus, cold- hardy spinach, and
other salad greens. The garden- bereft don’t have to live without these
pleasures. In most of the country, farmers’ markets get going in April or
early May. Especially in the Northeast, market gardeners are also savvy
about stretching the season with cold frames, so these treasures can fi ll
their stalls very early, in limited quantities that will go to the early risers.
If you picture the imaginary vegetannual, you’ll see these are the earli-