Last year, we grew onions at Magicland Farms – our world famous Newaygo Newaygo sweets and sweet Spanish onions. The Newaygo Newaygo onions were a huge hit at the stand – wonderful taste and nice size but they are not an onion that will store well. The sweet Spanish onions were also tasty and we brought home some to use over the winter and they have stored pretty well. Today, I was making a BBQ Meatloaf for lunch and we came up with some sad news. The onions are about done and pretty soon we will have to find somewhere to get some onions from.

The good news about this is that the onions lasted until almost March – we are quite pleased with that. The bad news is that we don’t exactly know what to buy to keep us going until our onions come in. We are hesitant to buy onions from a foreign country and, with the salmonella/e.coli scares of the past seasons, don’t exactly trust the produce we find in our local grocery store.

This is one of the big reasons that the “buy local” movement is so important today. If you buy local, you know where your food is coming from and in a lot of instances you can get to know the farmer who grew it.

Of course, buying only local produce also has the tradeoff that you only buy what is in season and right now for us, local onions are not in season. So, the big challenge is to find a decent onion that we can grow and will store a bit longer for winter use. Maybe one of the new ones we are growing this year will be the one that will solve our winter storage problem. Let’s hope so!