This year (2020), we never experienced a true summer—warm and sunny. Throughout June and July, rains fell—various kinds: cold, lingering ones, torrential downpours with hail and thunderstorms, tedious, damp, drizzly showers, short bursts that appeared unexpectedly. The wind brought clouds, pouring out masses of water. After the rain, the sun shone brightly again, and rainbows appeared in the sky.
Sunny days were few and far between, with average temperatures just above 20 degrees Celsius during the day and between 6 and 12 degrees Celsius at night. The rare hot days were downright festive. And now it's August 5th, and it's been raining all day. And the preliminary weather forecast for August isn't encouraging either: rain, rain, rain.
The soil in the garden is constantly damp; the earth never dries out; it's become dense and heavy. Excessive moisture causes all sorts of diseases and rot to appear on vegetables and flowers.
The onion bed isn't producing a happy harvest either. Almost all of the onions are rotten. We pulled them out and threw away most of the harvest.
We don't plant a lot of onions; they don't keep well; they start to rot from the inside. So we have just one small bed with three rows of different onions. We mostly eat them at the dacha, picking some of the heads with the greens, and leaving the rest to grow large. After all, fresh, juicy onions are much tastier than store-bought ones.
At the beginning of July, the onion looked healthy, it had green feathers and bulbs were beginning to form.
Then the tops started turning yellow and white, and the stems also changed color from green to gray. After pulling out one of these onions, I noticed they had no roots, and the bottom of the bulb was soft, rotten, and smelled foul. Almost the entire row of Sturon onions, which I was planting for the first time, was lost. I pulled out the spoiled onions, loosened the soil, and watered them with phytosporin. Later, we planted radishes there.
The rest of the onions looked fine. But by the end of July, they, too, couldn't handle the excess moisture and began to rot. Of course, I could have installed hoops over the onion bed and covered it with plastic, but I didn't feel like fussing over a dozen bulbs.
This is our onion harvest this year.
The remaining bulbs are quite large, they are not yet fully ripe, their stems are thick and green.
I washed them and removed all the husks.
This is what spoiled bulbs look like: without roots, with a rotten bottom, with cracks from excess moisture.
Also, turnips, zucchini, and pumpkin are rotting in our garden.