Chives are a lovely herb for your harden adding both lovely flowers and tasty flavorful stalks, but chives are also nearly impossible to kill once you let them spread short of excavating the area you plant them in. We love chives and grow them year round indoors and seasonally outside, but chives are best for attentive gardeners as they can easily get out of hand and take over a bed if you let them. While the risk of over spread is low with yearly maintenance, chives are one of the few plants you will almost never have to worry about dying on accident.
Chive Details:
- Family: Amaryllidaceae
- Growing Season: Spring
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 3-4 inches (7.5-10 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: 80 to 90 days from seed
- Indoor Starting: 8 to 10 weeks before last spring frost
- Earliest Planting: After danger of last frost
- Watering: Water when soil is dry, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not over water. Chives generally need 1 inch of water per week.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: Plant seeds 1/4 inch deep and water well. Transplant seedlings into larger dug holes to give the root ball enough space to take hold.
- Weeding: Chives do not need much weeding and in fact will crowd out most weeds except grasses.
- Harvesting: harvest chives with garden or kitchen shears as needed in the kitchen. It is hard to over harvest the plant. Be sure to clip no closer than 1 inch above the ground. And shorter may harm the plants regrowth rates.
- Known Pests: Almost none. Chives can be used to deter other pests when planted around central beds.
More About Chives
Chives can be split into new plants every 2-4 years so it’s very easy to propagate a lot of chives very easily. If we were to judge every plant we’ve ever raised, chives would be the easiest by far. We’ve personally never had to start any from seed, though they will readily grow from seed even outdoors. For us and most people with chives they have inherited a transplant of another plant. The way chives grow allows for them to be split at the root and then replanted to make two or more plants. In fact, if you are using them often, it is best to split them every couple of years to keep them growing optimally.
Getting rid of chives is a completely different story. If you want to remove chives you need to dig them up and be sure you get rid of all of the roots. They can come back shockingly quickly and tend to act more like weeds if they are from inherited outdoor splittings that have acclimated to the climate over the years. Still, since they are edible and a good replacement for onions in a pinch, they are worth planting.
If you worry about them being too invasive in your garden, don’t. While they are hard to remove, they don’t creep much and take years to spread even a few feet (so long as you don’t them seed). If you are still worried, they grow great in pots too and you can keep them indoors year round with enough light.
Chives also have lovely purple flowers that we personally find quite charming. They deter some pests and are lovely on the edge or outskirts of a garden. We don’t plant them in raised beds as we rotate our planting each season and chives are a plant once, have forever sort of plant.
Chive Tasting and Food Notes
Chives taste a bit like onion greens. While they are a little more soapy in flavor and a bit more bold and peppery, they can often be used anywhere you could use an onion. The greens can be eaten raw or cooked. They can burn and produce a more bitter flavor so we don’t recommend using them with high heat applications.
If you have a lot of chives you can use them anywhere you might like their taste, but primarily this will be a flavor ingredient in savory dishes. It is very easy to have too much chive around and you can simply leave what you don’t plan on eating and avoid harvesting it altogether. We’ve never exceeded using a whole plant throughout the year, but if you really use it up you can preserve chives as a dried herb for future applications.
Once cut chives start losing some flavor, but even still you can keep them in the fridge for quite awhile. We recommend simply keeping a single potted chive plant and harvesting fresh when you need it as that will likely cover you for the whole year.
Should I Grow Chives in My Garden?
Chives are so low maintenance that it’s silly to not want to grow them. If you don’t like the taste we would recommend you avoid them, but if you use them ever grow at least one plant. If you’re in an area where you need a pest deterrence they make good garden perimeters. While everyone’s tastes may vary, chives are so simple to grow and keep growing for years, so you might as well give them a try.