If you don’t count the broad beans and garlic, both of which I put in before the winter proper began, shallots are always the first off the starting blocks in spring on my plot. Normally I have them in by mid-February, but this year I’ve held back a couple of weeks because I didn’t fancy planting them with an icepick.

I’d been taking a few years off shallots until last year, as I couldn’t see the point of them when I was growing onions anyway. And they were always a bit disappointing: I never managed to get the fat clusters and bumper yields everyone else went on about. So I came to the conclusion that it was a waste of good onion-growing space.

In fact, as it turns out, I just didn’t know how to grow shallots. I got given some ‘Hative de Niort’ last year and plonked them in for lack of anything else to do with them. I had to squirrel off a chunk of a bed that was intended for beans, which meant it had had bucketloads of compost poured onto it the previous year, so it was particularly rich: unlike my previous sorry specimens, grown on the good but quite ordinary soil I thought onions liked, these shallots thrived most gratifyingly. It was a good lesson in the importance of doing things differently rather than giving up if they aren’t working.

One thing I hadn’t bargained for is that shallots are much more entertaining than onions: they split into little clumps which gradually splay outwards on the surface of the soil and look very sophisticated, making you feel secretly a little swanky about how good you are at growing vegetables.

I got a massive harvest – three sizeable net bags full from a single row – and each perfect little shallot was fat, succulent, bronze-burnished and inviting. We’ve only just finished eating them (long after the stored maincrop onions finished) and the flavour was fabulous too. Anyway: so I’ve now been entirely converted to shallot-growing for the foreseeable future.

This year I’m planting ‘Jermor’, as long and elegant as ‘Hative de Niort’ is short and fat. It’s also French, though, which bodes well for the quality of the flavour. At the other end of the row are some ‘Red Sun’: I’ve got a bit of a thing about red onions and love cooking with them, so I thought I’d try some red shallots too for a change. 

Quite apart from their  interesting growing habits and good looks, shallots are invaluable for another, more practical reason: they store a great deal better than onions. A string of well-dried onions will last pretty well until maybe January or February before you start getting the odd green sprout or rotten patch. Shallots, on the other hand, store for a year or more: you can still be eating last year’s shallots as this year’s are being dug if you grow enough. This means they bridge that annoying onion gap you get between about February and July – and if you use anything like as many onions as we do, that by itself is why I will never be without shallots again.