I Bought 80 Onions!

Prices for onions have come down to a mere 88 cents a pound — that would be 5.5 cents an ounce. You can get them cheaper if you buy them in bags, but that invariably means you end up with at least one that’s spoiled, pushing the price per onion right back up to what it would have cost if you’d selected them carefully, one by one.

I don’t buy large onions, because I usually can’t use a whole one and end up sticking half of it into the fridge, where it eventually dissolves into onion mush. Weighed the small onion I picked up at the Safeway a couple days ago: 12 ounces. That little brown onion cost me 66 cents. A large one would have cost pretty close to a buck. And that, IMHO, is ridiculous.

So I bought 80 of them.

Well. Not exactly of them. 🙂 At Lowe’s the other day, after I’d made my way into the store around the blacktop-roaming pedestrian, I ambled past the nursery’s bulb display and spotted, lo! The last bag of white onion sets. Cost: $1.93 for 80 little onion bulbs.

{Grab!}

So yesterday while I was having another gardening frenzy, I planted them all in the newly enlarged and compost-enriched watering rings around an orange tree and a backyard rose. The package instructions said you could plant them just an inch apart, so in theory you could plant quite a few of them in a good-sized pot.

We’ll see if they grow. If not, little ventured: $1.93 isn’t going to break me up in business. But if they do turn into onions, I’ll have enough to give to all my friends — at two cents apiece!

Image: Yellow onion. © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0.