Every year without fail, the first fresh tastes from the garden are super-nutritious chives. For perhaps 4,000 years, gardeners like me have opened the season by snipping away at chives as they emerge from their winter rest.
I grow two types of chives and recommend that other gardeners do the same. Both the round leaves and pink flowers of common chives (Allium schoenoprasum) are welcome in the kitchen. Mature plants bloom heavily in spring and sporadically thereafter, and the plants disappear into dormancy in late autumn. The flat leaves of garlic chives (A. tuberosum) also emerge in early spring, but the fragrant white flowers wait until late summer to appear on upright stems. The blossoms are great favourites of bees, wasps, and other beneficial insects, and they make excellent cut flowers.
![Chive flowers]()
Common chives in full bloom makes an eye-catching container plant
Are Chives Invasive?
No and yes. Common chives are native to both sides of the Atlantic, so they don’t qualify as exotics in these areas. They are also self-limiting in their clumping growth habit, with colonies more than three years old prone to dying out in the middle. For chives, shedding seeds into nearby soil is a sound survival strategy.
But there’s a catch. Like other seeds with a high fat content, chive seeds lose viability quickly, often within two years under good storage conditions. Chive seeds shed in late summer are highly likely to sprout the following spring, with few thereafter. Some years result in more seeds than others, with two-year-old clumps producing the heaviest seed crops. Once the blossoms peak, snipping them off prevents unwanted reseeding and pushes the plants to produce more green leaves.
What if you forget to deadhead? If you let a robust bed or container of chives produce a full crop of seeds, you can expect to see little volunteers in nearby beds for a couple of years. They are easy to pull out.
![Garlic chives in spring]()
Garlic chives, ready for harvest
Garlic Chives
Garlic chives are more root oriented, as they grow from sturdy intertwined roots. Garlic chives were domesticated in the mountainous Shanxi province in northern China, and later shared with the rest of the world. The long-lived clumps slowly spread outward and require little care beyond routine weeding and deadheading in early autumn.
When garlic chive plants are allowed to produce mature seeds, they are capable of naturalising in many climates and are often perceived as invasive. Like feral asparagus, colonies appear on roadsides and in ditches where little else will grow, where they go unnoticed until they burst into bloom in August.
Having grown garlic chives for many years, I have found them easy to dig and move to new spots, and unwanted seedlings have been rare and easy to pull. They are a delicious treat in early spring, and in summer the blossoms attract a long list of insects, as captured in this photo montage from the Evelyn Jackson Wildlife Garden in North Carolina.
![Garlic chives and showy sedum]()
Garlic chive flowers are pretty enough to hold their own alongside showy sedum
5 Tips for Growing Chives
You can start with fresh seeds or purchased seedlings. Seeds gathered the previous season will sprout willingly, while chive seeds more than two years old may not germinate at all.
1. Chive seeds like tough love, and sometimes respond poorly when started indoors. Instead, get an early start by winter sowing seeds in milk jugs, or plant them directly in the garden in spring.
2. Chives grow best in small bunches of at least six to 10 plants. A small pot of chives will double in size its first year. Move the clump to a larger pot if needed, but let it become quite crowded before dividing it.
![Forcing chives indoors]()
A pot of chives brought indoors in winter starts growing within days
3. Divide chives every 2 to 3 years, preferably in early spring. Pull small bunches of six or more plants from the outside of a clump and transplant them into pots or beds. Chives have heavy, resilient roots that make them easy to separate and transplant.
4. To have fresh chives through winter, pot up some divisions in late autumn and grow them through winter on a sunny windowsill. Or, keep a pot of chives in a protected spot outdoors through winter, and bring it inside in February to force a first taste of spring.
5. Preserve chives by freezing them in ice cubes, or make chive butter to freeze in small portions. Chive infused oil requires refrigeration, but it’s a good way to preserve a bumper crop of chives.
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