I harvested our onions Sept. 7 and left them in the shed to cure.

The tops had all died back and some had started to resprout, so I knew it was time.

We have some that are baseball size and larger, but we have quite a few that are only an inch in diameter. The small ones will be used in the baked onions we like for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

We grew Superstar for the white, Alisa Craig for the yellow and Red Burgermeister for the red. The red was the most productive, followed by the yellow and the white at the bottom, but all did pretty well.

Next I have to harvest potatoes. I read somewhere a long time ago that you shouldn't age onions and potatoes in the same area at the same time because they have a bad effect on each other. I am not sure it is true, but it doesn't cause me any inconvenience, so I do it.

I think we will have a good crop of potatoes this year. The vines on the dark red Norland died back first and we used those as new potatoes for most of the summer. Then the Carola started going back, and that is what I am using now.

I switched providers because the one I had been using did not deliver them until late May or early June. In southern Maine they really should be planted in late April or early May, and getting them in that early made a big difference in production.

I was going to dig over the weekend, but it is a bit easier if the soil is dry, and that didn't happen.

I feel a bit guilty for growing potatoes. I spoke with Jim Dill for a column I was writing. He is a pest specialist and educator working with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in Orono, and a couple of weeks ago he was dealing with a pesticide-resistant strain of late blight -- the cause of the Irish potato famine -- that was hitting commercial potato fields.

Dill said that home potato growers, like me, don't spray for blight, and the blight can travel 40 miles in damp weather. I hate to think that my home garden is causing problems for people who have to make a living by farming. So maybe I should use an organic blight control of some sort on the potatoes.

Onto a happier topic, I spent more than an hour having Royce O'Donal give me a tour of the topiaries at his home and wrote about it in Sunday's column. He is a fascinating man.

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