This year has been a difficult year for onion growers. A long autumn set planting season followed by a hard winter gave us low yields.
However, from our plant breeder’s perspective, we saw very few bolters and produced some good quality bulbs.
The spring set crop performed satisfactorily considering the growing season but, ever the pessimist, a crop can only be judged on its final return and many growers are only just starting to market their crop.
There are currently a small percentage of spring drilled onions still to be harvested and if these wet conditions continue it will be difficult to harvest them before they deteriorate.
We started delivering autumn sets in October. At the time, it was very dry and growers were holding back from planting to minimise the bolting risk.
A month on and we still have growers in the UK waiting to plant due to the wet soil conditions. Oh, how we long for the dry period of October!
As one grower mentioned today, it is bad enough to experience one long, wet autumn where crops were harvested in poor conditions and soil structures destroyed, but to experience another one now is almost disastrous.
2013 has been a challenging year in more ways than one.
So, with trepidation, I finish my report and continue my planning for the 2014 season.