Last week we hit whatever cold-weather threshold we needed to hit to call for Potato and Leek soup and I went into the garden to dig up the leeks, which are among my favorite vegetables to grow.
When I started the messy business of cleaning them up things got…gross…small brown little eggish things, maybe half the length and width of a grain of rice. Something had burrowed into the leeks and laid eggs up and down the vertical length of multiple layers of every. single. one.
I’ve grown leeks for twelve years, I think almost every year we have lived here, as well as scallions, and never had an issue. The seeds were indifferently chosen, one of the common ones – King Richard or Tadorna maybe. I usually plant blue solaise (in the photo above) because they are gorgeous, so I am telling myself it was the variety that was to blame and this will not happen next year.
I dutifully cleaned all of their detritus out of the garden and am hoping for the best next year. I let a blue solaise overwinter *last* year, which allowed it to flower this spring (they are biennials). I covered the flower before it opened (didn’t want to create a hybrid of…whatever…out of luck and incompetence) and harvested the flower late summer. So I do have blue solaise seeds to start this winter. Allium seeds don’t last long; I think two years tops, and blue solaise are harder to get than others.
I believe this year’s criminal masterminds are allium leek miners, and if you would like to have a look, see here. Pleasant, yes?
Evidently the solution is to cover the crop, which I won’t be doing, no matter how much I love them, because I refuse to work that hard for onions (see also: carrots). Another solution, and this may be the plan I go with, is to plant them later than normal – so May or June, avoiding the times when the parent moth is fluttering around looking to ruin someone’s good time in November. I’ll have to research it after the new year when planning for the vegetable garden will start.
Anyway. So I threw out all my leeks. And was sad. I cheered myself up by digging the tomatoes out of the freezer and canning harissa.
It wasn’t the same.