We harvested our Copra onions a week or so ago. This type of onion was hybridized to store well over the course of the winter, often for several months. Conventional gardening wisdom recommends leaving the onions on the surface of the soil to dry, but at Red Bucket Farm it never fails to rain immediately after harvesting. We didn't think that it was smart to cure the onions on a damp garden bed, so we built a drying table. It's a simple wood frame built of 2x4 lumber with 1/4 inch hardware cloth as the floor of the table. This is useful for drying onions, potatoes, squash and hops. When the weather threatens to rain, we hoop the table with old fencing and cover it with a tarp.
After a week of drying in the sun (and sometimes hiding from rain), we cut off the dried green tops of the onions and store them in boxes in our pantry refrigerator. Growing conditions must have been favorable this year, because we yielded a full fifty pounds of onions. Sometimes gardening can be very frustrating, but I'll admit to feeling pretty satisfied with this harvest.
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