It happened a few weeks ago…
My neighbor Terry, invited some of us over to harvest onions in his backyard. Now, that may not sound very exciting to some people, but I know YOU (fellow gardeners) get it. Nothing is more exciting to an edible gardener than fresh-from-the-garden produce. Am I right? And the idea of getting together for wine, snacks and ripping onions out of the soil is…well, it’s a PARTY of epic proportions!
Yep. We knew we were “garden-geeks” when we spent the first 30 minutes at the party just snapping closeups of all the onions. Seriously! It was a crackup to see all of us pull out our iPhones and start taking photos…of ONIONS.
The Hipstomatic shots seemed to get the most oohs and ahhhs.
But it didn’t stop there. We each brought onion-related snacks (to go with the wine) and somehow, we managed to talk about our gardens, organic techniques, and the new plants we had recently discovered for the entire time. Heaven!
Terry is an extremely generous gardener who truly enjoys sharing his harvest with friends. What’s not to love about that?!
We each came home with several different varieties of fresh-picked onions AND Terry’s recipe for French Onion soup. Mmmmm!
It got me to thinking about what other types of harvest parties we could have this summer. Most of our parties already involve everyone bringing a dish of homegrown ingredients.
But why not have everyone participate in the harvest and cooking of that food while at the party? I’m going to try it.
Perhaps a Salad Party with different choices of salads and dressings made with the home picked herbs? Or a Tomato Party with gazpacho and caprese salad?
All sounds good to me! I’ll let you know how it turns out!
About the Author
Theresa Loe blogs here about taking the garden full circle while striving for a more local, fresh-from-the-garden lifestyle. She is a TV producer, video host, freelance garden writer and a wrangler of chickens and children. (Not necessarily in that order.) For more information on these topics, you can subscribe to her free monthly newsletter.
Theresa Loe is the award- winning Co-Executive Producer & Canning Expert on Growing A Greener World TV. She blogs here about Living Homegrown®, local and fresh-from-the-garden. 
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
This sounds so cool, I can see doing this. We kinda do the same thing each Labor Day weekend, when we make apple cider from our apples- we have friends come from all over, some camp in our back yard for the weekend, and we make cider, apple sauce, apple slices for the freezer etc. I would love doing a ‘salad party’ in the spring!
I wanna live in YOUR neighborhood Paula. That sounds great on Labor Day!
Oooh, harvest party…what fun! Since I enjoy taking photos of our veggies, I totally understand going gaga over onions.
You know what’s kind of sad – we live out in a rural area and we’re about the only ones around who have a big garden. When we go on vacation, our neighbors help us take care of our chickens and we always tell them to please harvest as much food as they can. But it never happens. Some of them say, “oh, we didn’t want to take it all so that you wouldn’t have any when you get back”…and despite our continual assurance that that is simply not the case, and our trying to educate them that if they didn’t harvest, the plants will shut down and stop producing for us, they don’t ever harvest more than 1% of the veggies.
So, in recent years, hubby has learned to plan his plantings so that during the weeks we’ll be gone in the summer, we won’t have many, if any, veggies that will be ripening or ready. We just can’t understand why anyone would pass up free, fresh, organic veggies that they didn’t even have to plant or weed or do any work on other than harvesting.
Wow Teresa. That is so interesting. I never would have thought that was the case. But it makes sense. I guess non-gardeners would not understand that you NEED to harvest to keep the plant flowering and producing. I agree, it is sad that they are missing out. What a shame.
I would keep trying to get them to pick. Maybe eventually they will catch on. And getting the fresh produce and eggs is such a great gift in exchange for them taking care of things while you are away!
Theresa
Have you seen the episode of No Reservations when Anthony Bourdain travels to Spain? The segment on calçots will inspire you to grow them and throw a harvest party of your own! I have my calendar marked for the beginning of September to plant onions for my own calçot experiment.
I had not see that one yet. I’m going to try to catch it. AWESOME! Thanks.
What a lovely sounding party, would LOVE to have joined you
) Clearly I’m going to have to grow more onions (as if I need an excuse). Lovely that Terry shared his soup recipe.