When Layers Tell the Story
What sweet onions teach us about time, capacity, and trust
By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
When I look at this box, I do not just see onions.
I see time.
Tomorrow about 1,500 sweet yellow onions will slip into the soil at Emmanuel, our second garden site, planted by TNGP stewards, the weekly veterans who show up on Thursdays, co-stewards, and community garden stewards. Each one is small enough to fit between your fingers. By the time we pull them from the ground around May 2026, the world will have turned through cold fronts, warm fronts, birthdays, hard days, and quiet mornings that no one will remember. The onions will remember. They will carry every one of those days in the layers they build.
Right now, this box holds about twenty pounds of tiny onion plants. They sit side by side, roots tucked in, looking small and manageable. By next May, those same plants will become close to thirteen hundred pounds of sweet onions. The weight of them will require wheelbarrows, trucks, and tables to hold what this one cardboard box could never contain.
The container that holds them today will be far too small to hold them then, and that is not an accident. It is written into their design. Onions are not meant to stay tray sized. They are meant to stretch beyond the space that first carried them. God created seeds to outgrow the trays that raised them, to press against their early limits, to demand more room because more life has formed inside.
This is multiplication and capacity building in plain sight. One small box becomes row after row of green tops. Row after row becomes hundreds of bulbs. Those bulbs become meals, strength in someone’s body, and seed for future plantings. The original container cannot hold the finished work, just like the first version of our lives cannot hold what God intends to grow in us. Creation keeps reminding us that His plan was never maintenance. His plan was always increase that flows through formation.
Once these onions are planted, the first thing they do is not grow up. They grow down. Roots explore the soil, searching for water and minerals. They anchor the plant so that wind and rain do not rip it out of the ground. In those first weeks not much seems to be happening. The green tops stay short. The real work is hidden, a picture of the slow kind of foundation that never makes the highlight reel.
Then the leaves start to stretch. Onions do not fatten the bulb first. They invest in leaf after leaf, each one a small solar panel. Sunlight hits those leaves, and the plant turns light and air and water into sugar. Those sugars travel back down into the base of the plant, where the bulb begins to form.
Here is a simple secret that I love to share in the garden. Every leaf you see above ground becomes a layer inside the onion. Leaf by leaf, the plant is building the rings we will see later on the cutting board. As the onions grow, we can count those leaves. Once there are thirteen or more standing, we know that onion has the potential to size up into a good, solid bulb. While most people only notice the final onion in their hand, the gardener learns to read the tops as a promise of what is forming out of sight.
Through winter rain and spring storms these onions will hold the soil in place. Their roots will feed the hidden life that lives under our feet. Tiny organisms will gather around those roots, trading nutrients for the sugars that leak from the plant. The soil grows richer while the onion grows larger. Both are changed by the quiet exchange.
As the days grow longer, day length becomes the onion’s clock. Once the light is right, the plant shifts from building leaves to swelling the bulb. Layer by layer, the onion stores energy that it will never use for itself. It will not live to eat what it has saved. It gives its stored life away when someone cuts into it in a kitchen months from now.
Sometime in May the tops will begin to yellow and fall over. That is the plant’s way of saying, “I have finished what I was sent here to do.” We will bend down, loosen the soil, and lift each bulb into the light for the first time. They will look like simple onions. The truth is that each one will be a six month story of weather, water, care, and patience.
From there the work continues. We will cure them so the outer layers dry and protect the inside. Then they will travel into homes and kitchens where the real purpose shows up in everyday ways that are easy to overlook.
A sweet onion is more than flavor in a skillet. It brings vitamin C that supports the immune system, sulfur compounds that help lower inflammation, and plant chemicals that support heart health and may guard against certain diseases. It carries prebiotic fibers that feed the good bacteria in our gut, which in turn helps digestion, mood, and overall health. It is a simple vegetable that quietly serves nearly every system in the body.
The mighty onion. Most people meet it only after it has been chopped and tossed into a pan. They taste the sweetness but never see the six months of formation that made that sweetness possible. The gardener sees it all. The cold mornings. The slow leaf count. The first sign that the bulb is finally swelling. The tiny twenty pound beginning that becomes a harvest the original box could never hold. That history is what makes the flavor so rich.
I am learning to live the same way. For most of my life I tried to prove what could be done inside a set timeline. I measured worth by how fast something grew, how quickly it filled beds, how impressive it looked from a distance. That way of living kept me tight and anxious, always checking the clock instead of trusting the root work God was doing under the surface.
I am done with that. I am done proving what can only happen through time. I am done trying to show results on a schedule that keeps God small and keeps me in control.
The onion is helping retrain me. We do not stand over a bed of onions and demand that they hurry. We do not ask them to be tomatoes or strawberries or something more impressive. We simply expect an onion to be an onion, to do what it was created to do, in the time it was given. If it does not, we say something is wrong. Yet in our own lives we carry expectations that God never put on us. We rush what He is still rooting. We judge what He is still forming. We call incomplete what He still calls in process.
These onions do not apologize for taking six months. They do not rush their roots to satisfy anyone’s expectations. They do what they were designed to do. Roots first. Then leaves. Then the quiet swelling underground that no one can rush and no one can fully see.
God is revealing my life one layer at a time, just like these onions. There are seasons where it feels like nothing is happening, when all I can see are short green tops and bare soil. There are other seasons where the leaves are stacking, capacity is building, and I still cannot see the bulb. Slowly, He is helping me trust that hidden formation is not failure. It is preparation. The early containers of my life were never meant to hold the fullness of what He intends to grow. My part is to stay rooted, stay available, and let Him decide when it is time for the next layer to be revealed.
This is why I love planting days like tomorrow. We are not just putting onions in the ground. We are sowing meals for families who have not yet walked into this garden. We are filling future soups and skillets with something that began as a thin green shoot in November. We are choosing to believe that months from now, when someone slices into a sweet yellow onion and breathes in that first smell, they will taste more than food. They will taste the fruit of time, care, surrender, multiplication, and a God who still chooses to work through seeds, soil, and very ordinary people.
In the end, that is what Stories from the Soil is about. Remembering that nothing truly good appears out of nowhere. Someone planted. Someone waited. Someone trusted the slow miracle that most of the world never sees.
