Dave Wood

HOUSEHOLD HINT: If it’s springtime once again and the voice of the turtle is heard in your Pierce County garden plot, do not, DO NOT, purchase your onion sets at the local grocery store! Last year we tried that, bought locally and were charged more than $4 for a tiny net bag of yellow onion sets. I opened the cunning little bag and counted its contents: 99 sets. Or 4.4 cents per resultant finished scallion. That makes the rising price of hamburger seem like child’s play. 

This year, I foxed the grocers and drove to Larkin Valley, just outside Whitehall and the site of my first brush with first grade. Where that old schoolhouse once stood, now stands the Amish farm of Mr. And Mrs. Menno Lambrecht, whose machine shed also serves as their Garden Center. My Beautiful wife dashed in, bought a brown paper sack of yellow sets for $1.10. How many sets? A whopping 91, or 1.2 cents per set. We headed for I-94 and the 100-mile trip home, happy for not having been burned once again by the humble, but essential onion.

Yes, “burned again.” As I sorted the golden spheroids my thoughts went back almost half a century to our hobby farm in western Wisconsin when our neighbor lady Martina Sylla gave us a handful of multiplier onion sets, strange creatures that looked like tan garlic buds. Martina’s husband Henry, who picked up a strong Polish accent from his immigrant parents, allowed as how these gems were a wonder of nature, sweet as a shallot and would keep in the basement for years. Then he showed how to break the little oval onions off the central stem and stick each into the dirt, like a normal onion set.

“It’s sorta like AMERICAN capitalism, you get eight big bulbs-- that’s like investment capital—break each into its eight oval parts—you plant da parts, and in da fall, you end up wid 64 parts,” Henry philosophized. His analysis struck us even better than playing the market, so Ruth and I followed Henry’s directions and green sprouts soon sprung out of the fertile soil of Dissmore Coulee, as we hoed and weeded, visions of the young J.D. Rockefeller puncturing hundreds of spurting oil wells in western Pennsylvania popped into our collective subconscious.

“Can we eat some now?” asked Ruth in a moment of feminine weakness there in our very own Garden of Eden.

“Heavens no!” I scolded. “That’ll ruin the whole business plan if we tinker with Henry’s equation!”

She relented to my superior intelligence, and we continued to sow and to save until we had several Leinie’s beer cases full of the precious seedlings.

“But we’re not a business,” Ruth retaliated.

“Of course not! But we certainly must use some common sense and adhere to the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.”

So Ruth has faithfully dried and stored them. Periodically she’s suggested we fry a few. With great patience I reminded her that a business which expects to grow, to keep up with the times, must plow its earnings right back into that business.

“But we are not a business!” she’d lamely replied, wringing her hands, roughened by scores of errant onion skins.

After seven years of toil and sweat my vision was accomplished, and only then did I realize visions usually have an underside: Rockefeller was forced to break up his oil monopoly, Henry Ford had continuous arguments with his son Edsel, Howard Hughes turned into a raging hypochondriac and forgot all the hustle and bustle of the brassiere he invented for Jane Russell.

And me? In my mad dash for horticultural success I had failed to see the forest for the trees, or rather the garden for the onion sets. Eight cases of sets, when properly divided, would cover our hilly 47 acres and encroach on Ansel Hagen’s cornfield at our Northern border.

“You have sold your soul, not for a mess of pottage, but for a mess of onion sets,” said Ruth as we loaded up the not so Merry Oldsmobile and headed west with hope to discover that evasive monster Success. Minnesota? Gov. Perpich wants to build a chopstick factory on the Iron Range….?