Over the last few years, I’ve learned a few key things about growing chives successfully in my garden, so in today’s post, we’ll discuss how to grow chives.
Chives are some of my favorite herbs to grow because they thrive so easily, they’re one of the first plants to come up in the spring, and they can be used for so many different dishes and recipes. If you have a little vegetable garden space where you live, you should definitely learn how to grow chives. If you’re a new gardener, you should grow chives. If you’re planting a kids’ garden, you should grow chives. You get the picture. They’re really one of those garden plants that anyone can grow. I love how cheerful and bright green the shoots are when they’re sprouting up in early spring, and they work just as well in a perennial flower garden as they do in an herb garden. These chives that I’ll be showing you today are actually in our little backyard flower garden because I love their cheerful purple blooms, but I also have a few in our vegetable patch that I use more for cooking and less for their ornamental qualities.
What are Chives?
Chives are one of many different varieties of plants in the allium family, along with onions, garlic, leeks, and scallions. Because chives have a milder flavoring than other alliums, and because you don’t eat the bulb like an onion, finely chopped or minced fresh chives are one of the most often-used savory toppings for baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, gourmet soups, and french fries. When considering using chives vs green onions, choose chives if you want a garnish that is smaller and even milder in flavor. Although chives are prized for their fragrant foliage, the edible flowers that you see during their bloom time can also be used to enhance your culinary endeavors and the purple blooms are beautiful on salads, stir-fry dishes, or pastas.
Growing Chives: The Basics
Chives are a flowering herbaceous perennial plant herb with a mild oniony/garlicky flavor. They are usually cultivated as a garnish for so many savory dishes, and my kids love to pick them right out of the garden, where they’re planted next to the thyme and lavender for a snack. Their cute little purple flowers come out in the late spring and early summer. The best part about growing these herbs, though, is their hardiness. They’re so easy to grow, and they come back looking bigger and more spectacular every year!
Perennial herbs for a long-maintenance garden: How to Grow Mint Successfully
Gardening Habits to Keep Perennial Herbs Happy
Chive plants always look amazing in the early spring, with healthy clumps of bright green leaves popping up as soon as the days get longer, but they can start to look a little sad once summer rolls around and their blooms start to fade. To encourage new leaf growth throughout the season, it’s important to pinch back the spent blooms, or better yet, snip the blooms with scissors earlier and enjoy them as a really fun culinary garnish on your meals!
Try a teaspoon of sliced chives with a few blooms in a homemade vinaigrette to really boost your salad’s presentation.
While chives can grow well in shade, they really prefer full sun. If you grow your chives in shade, they’ll do fine, your plants just won’t grow to be quite so big and bushy. If you want your chives to really fill in though, go for the sun! These drought-tolerant herbs thrive especially well in a sunny, well-drained spot and are naturally resistant to pests. Watering them every few days during the hottest weather should be sufficient if you keep a layer of mulch around the base of your plants.
Transplanting chives into pots on your porch can make them easier to access for cooking throughout the season and provide a lively boost of green to your container gardens.
Popular plants for herb gardening: Lavender Plant Care Guidelines
Harvest Time
You can harvest chives at any point from when they first come up in the spring until the fall. It’s important to note that they love to be harvested and will do much better throughout the season if you harvest and use them regularly.
To harvest, always remove the leaves from the outside of the perimeter of the plant and keep them snipped about 1/2″ above the ground. Even though you’ll be able to find so many uses for them, it’s important to never harvest the entire clump of leaves at once. The plant needs some full leaves to draw energy from the sun and ensure future growth.
If you’d like to enjoy your harvest year-round, freezing chopped chives is a great idea. Spread chopped chives on a baking sheet, allow them to freeze for a few hours, then transfer them to an airtight container for longer storage. If you’ll be using your fresh greens up within a few days, you can simply refrigerate them.
I’ve made the mistake of just enjoying chives as an ornamental plant and only harvesting them sparingly and I’ve been disappointed when they’ve started to look a little less beautiful later in the growing season. Moral of the story: Snip those herbs, and they’ll just keep making more!
More helpful gardening tips for herbs: How to Harvest Basil for Strong, Healthy, Productive Plants
And that’s really all there is to know about how to grow these abundant herbs successfully!
Do you grow chives in your garden?
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.