Summer time and the living is easy, fish are jumping and the earth is hot and dry. Late summer, early September and your garden looks tired but you can still have a fresh look (if you don’t mind the aromatic smell of garlic). Your border or herb garden can
still dazzle neighbors with white starry cluster of garlic chives blooming.
Garlic chives, Allium. tuberosum, have rounded two inch wide pincushion flowers topping the wild onion foliage. The edible leaves can be cut anytime while growing. An herb expert once told me to cut the chive off about six inches long, not to just snip the tops since constant snipping of the top would make the herb tough. Chives are amongst the most well known culinary herbs and garlic chives add a strong garlic punch to salads and cooking.
This species is best planted in rich moist soil in full sun. The plant will spread to form a one foot clump. The bigger the clump, the smaller, more poorly developed the bulbs. You can plant dormant bulbs in the fall with a planting depth of about two inches. Alliums are sold and shipped like daffodils or tulips with no foliage attached. When they arrive, you should plant them point up. You can also plant pot grown clumps of chives in the spring or fall. Of course, set them in the garden at the same depth that they were growing in the pot. They can be propagated by dividing root stock or breaking offsets from the parent bulb. They can also be grown from seed you can sow outdoors in the spring. As with all bulbs you should let the foliage die naturally since the foliage feeds the bulbs that produce next year’s plants.
Care is minimal, except to cut off the blooms before they seed. The reason this is important is that they self-seed rampantly. I found this out the hard way. I had a friend give me some garlic chives about six years ago. They were pretty tame for a while and at first I delighted to have garlic chives in my garden. I let them go to seed and then I had about 20 plants the third year. Again they were delightful to see blooming in the late summer. I even had friends ask me for some to plant; they were beautiful. Six years later and being a lazy gardener has caught up with me, I did not follow the simple rule of cutting off flower heads before
they make seeds, so now I have about (600) six hundred plants. They are popping up everywhere especially at the base of my perennials.
If you do a better job than I and deadhead, you can enjoy garlic chives growing along with your daylilies, iris, lavenders, thymes, lamb’s ear, catmint and many other border plants. Garlic chive is not an expensive plant but I would hate to see you have to spend any money getting started. Please bring a spade by my house I’ll gladly share the bounty.
