Tag: Onions

Onions

Drawing some of our onions with the new Manga vector mapping pen in Adobe Fresco, using an Apple Pencil, iPad Pro and a sketchboard pro drawing board.

onions

Growing through a dry summer and a heatwave, this year’s onions were smaller than the previous year’s – when we had a wetter summer – but they’ve kept better. One hazard last year was that the local foxes liked to pull up a few of the almost tennis ball-sized onions and stash them under the hedge. Thanks to damage by foxes and a wet spell before we lifted them, many of the onions went soft.

drawing onions
Drawing on the iPad Pro on the Sketchboard Pro drawing board
onions

Garage

garage

We’re rather unusual on our street in keeping a car in our garage but, like most of our neighbours, we use it as a store and work space. My 1976 Astro Daimler bicycle leans against the back wall but it hasn’t been used for years and when I last used it occasionally, it was to take parcels to the post office, rather than to get out touring the landscape, which was its original intended purpose.

boots

Our favourite way to get out in nature these days is to put on our hiking boots. They’re sitting on a unit saved from our old kitchen, which has proved to be a useful work bench.

Still hanging on the shelf unit, a string of large Stuggart Giant onions. We had a bumper crop of them last year, but because of cold, damp weather when we harvested them, they didn’t keep and soon turned bad.

Stuggart Giant

onions

As the name suggests, our Stuggart Giant sets gave us plenty of onions from a 4×6 foot section of our raised beds. Unfortunately because of the unpredictable weather last summer we weren’t able to gather the whole crop in to dry them in the greenhouse – there wasn’t room on the staging for the whole crop – so a lot of them stayed out in heavy rain. Probably because of this we found that a lot of them had gone soft before we got the chance to use them – including most of those in my drawing; they’ll be going straight to the compost bin.

This wouldn’t put me off growing the variety again, they’re a mild onion, which we like. We’d just make sure that we started early drying them off.

onion

Best of the Bunch

bananas

Or the least worst of the bunch. Drawing bananas is one thing but drawing them foreshortened is tricky. I found myself triangulating the black flower scars, as if I was looking for the pattern of a constellation. The repeated curves are more difficult to relate to each other.

I turned them around and tried an easier angle.

bananas

 

market blues
Wetherby market last Thursday

The banana is, botanically speaking, a berry, as is the kiwi fruit. The onion is a bulb.

kiwi

onions

ficus branch (artificial) old cherry tree

I got a chance to draw an old cherry and a Ficus benjamina (an artificial office plant version) on my travels recently.

There are now only three double-page spreads to go in my old sketchbook, then I can make a fresh start for the spring!

Onions and Bonfires

IT’S THAT time of year again when the garden is at its most productive. We’ve just cleared the broad beans but the runners are still at their best. We had the first tomatoes this week – two small sweet ones from the yellow variety we planted. The courgettes are doing well and we’re just about winning the battle to cut them before they turn into marrows.

We’ve had some decent rain this week, which was welcome but it did mean that we needed to lift the onions and spread them over the staging in the greenhouse to dry out gradually. The necks would have started to rot if we’d left them where they were in the bed. I’m always impressed by how many onions we harvest from an area no bigger than a hearth-rug.

Paul the gardener came today and we cut back the Canary ivy which was killed by frost last winter.

As it was a dull, overcast morning none of our neighbours had any washing out, so, as the woody stems were too large to add to the compost bin and I’ve got plenty of habitat piles already, we decided to dispose of the large pile of clippings by lighting a bonfire. Despite the recent rain the mass of stems were dry enough to burn but, as usual, in the minutes it took to get the fire started a column of white smoke drifted sideways and, although there wasn’t a breath of wind, it managed to find some low level turbulence and started heading straight up the garden path, over the hedge and up towards the one bedroom window that our neighbour had left open. You’d almost think that smoke had some kind of homing instinct that enabled it to find the nearest open window.