In early spring I took “ornamental kitchen gardening” to new heights by planting shallots, garlic and spring onions in between my decorative plants in the garden borders. We don’t eat a great deal of vegetables at home, but we do eat lots and lots of onions. So it was only natural that I wanted to grow a lot of onions myself. So I planted some Golden Gourmet shallot sets and grew spring onions from seeds and planted up spring onion offcuts as well. Everything was growing brilliantly until I noticed the leaves having translucent marks on them.

I cut open some of the leaves and found little white larvae inside. Although they didn’t cause a whole lot of damage, I didn’t fancy eating them in my stir fries and as soon as they were identified as “onion fly” larvae, I pulled all my onions and spring onions up. I kept the shallot bulbs after cutting the affected leaves off and they’re still fine months later (but tiny). But obviously this greatly reduced my onion crop.

Some research uncovered that onion fly should be countered by rotational planting but my garden isn’t very big and I had a few spring onions hidden in between other plants here and there, all seemed to be affected. If I wanted to reduce the risk of future crops being eaten by the same insects, I wouldn’t be able to grow onions anywhere in my garden.

But then I read that onion fly doesn’t like carrots (and neither does carrot fly like onions) so I decided the best way to go was to grow onions and carrots together. I am very keen to see if this plan will work. So currently I have some compost filled toilet rolls sitting on a window sill, some with spring onions and some with carrots in them. So these will be planted out next to each other in these small clusters and only time will tell if the plan will work.