Waiting for onions

My biggest onions, July 2017

We officially stopped buying vegetables a month ago, our last purchases being carrots, rutabaga, and onions.  The first two are long gone (and we're eating our own carrots now), but we still have a couple onions left--which I'm trying to ration out as slowly as possible as my garden onions aren't quite ready yet.

Several garden onions are a pretty decent size now;  some are approaching store-bought size.  Some are not.  I sowed the seeds in January in a tray on my kitchen windowsill.  I planted them out in February (I think?  Or was it March?) in clusters of two to five onions.  As space is limited, growing in clusters rather than rows means I get more onion per square meter (or about half a meter in this case).  The bulbs are bigger on average this year than previously;  last year I planted out onion sets separately, not in clusters.

They have also been getting the diluted contents of our wee bucket (yes, you read that right) two or three times a week.  I don't know if it's made them bigger/stronger but I've read that all the onion family like a lot of nitrogen.  When I can be bothered to walk all the way to the end of the Misc bed, I'll give the leeks a dose too.

But the onions are still growing and I'm not prepared to harvest them until they reach their maximum size.  We may be going without onions for a few weeks.  I guess I could always pull up a few shallots;  having planted them from grocery store bulbs I'm not quite so invested in their success--I really pampered those onions to get them to where they are today!