Henny Penny Farmette

With water use restricted in many counties because of the terrible drought, my garden is withering. Everyone in the Bay Area has to do their part. My onions look particularly pathetic.

In July, I polished a mystery I had hoped to sell. Mid-month, BEELINE TO MURDER sold to Kensington Publishing in New York as the first in a three-book deal. That meant I had to get cracking on the second book.

I forgot the onions. Poor things. The tops fell over and wilted, the bottoms swelled and stopped. A few succumbed to the soil organisms and bugs.

August rolled around and  I looked over the patch of brown stems and the heads that had gone to seed and vowed to dig everything out. But then . . . I got an offer to write a short nonfiction book that tied into the Law of Attraction, one of my favorite subjects. The onions had to wait for another 20 days until I cranked out that project.

Onion seeds fall out of dried blooms

Yesterday, my husband harvested the onions. Some have to be tossed because of bottom rot. Anything ignored will wither and die–that’s an axiom of gardening I’ve known since forever. So, the onions are gone, but their seeds are plentiful (thousands), so  this fall I will plant a new crop of onions and another in the spring and pray for rain.