Dave Wood

The snow has disappeared from our garden and I’m aching to get in and plant lettuce, but BW shouts “too early!” and I have to be content with remembering garden adventures of years long ago, like the 14-pound rutabaga my dad and I harvested from new breaking and how succeeding crops were small and bitter and not even suitable for flavoring the slop pail under the sink in our hobby farm kitchen.

It began in 1971 when we moved onto the farm for our first spring and summer and hired neighbor Henry Sylla to plow up a quarter acre of garden. Henry came on his old light gray Ford tractor with the hydraulic plow bobbing up and down along the gravel driveway. Henry brought a present from his wife Sara—a small paper bag of onion sets, multipliers, a type I’d never seen in our Minneapolis supermarkets. The sets looked like garlic buds and Henry said “You’ll like these. They’re mild and they keep all winter. Just separate them the way you would cloves off a garlic bud. Plant them and they’ll come up multiplied just the way you see them here.”

So that’s what the B.W. and I did. Soon green shoots were sprouting out of the red clay garden, a wonderfully productive environment for any member of the onion family. In autumn, we harvested half an empty Walter’s beer case full of multiplier onions. Henry was right. They were like the mild shallots that cost lots of green stuff at a gourmet market a few miles from our winter home in Minnesota. BW encouraged using the little buggers, but I counseled caution. “We’ve just made a start. What if most should spoil by spring? We mustn’t eat them up like little pigs.”

Ever dutiful, ever obedient, the BW said okay. Spring rolled around and true to Henry’s word, none of the multipliers had spoiled. So we tore them apart, like cloves of a garlic bud, and planted a new row, eight times as long as the year before. And when autumn came, we harvested eight times as much as we had the year before. That made about four beer cases full. The BW drooled over the idea of creamed onions, but again I counseled caution. What if much of this crop should freeze in the basement? Besides, we have plenty of spoilable Bermudas and shouldn’t we eat them first? The preservation of my multiplier onion horde had become A Very Big Passion.

And so it went, until two years later, when our root cellar in Minneapolis sported net bags of multipliers, crowding canned string beans off their shelves. Nevertheless, we dragged them to Wisconsin for spring planting. The BW finally put her dutiful foot down.

“We must get rid of some of these onions,” she said, “or I’ll get terminal heartburn from just looking at them.”

“Maybe so, maybe so,” I conceded. “I’ll take them into town and sell them to other gardeners who’d like to get a start on these shallot-like marvels that are so mild and well-keeping.”

I had little success peddling, when Dad’s friend Malcolm Warner finally said, “Sure, I’ll take some onions.”

“How much you willing to pay?” asked I.

“Pay?” said Malcolm. “I thought they were free.” Malcolm went home that noon with a beer case full of multipliers, so his wife, Marge could cream them. And that’s the end of the Multiplier Glut Episode. Of course I never told the BW how much money we didn’t make!

DAVE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU ABOUT A GARDENING STORY. PHONE HIM AT 715-426-9554. NO KALE STORIES, PLEASE.