Chives

Sow chive seed as early as the soil can be worked

Sow seed a quarter inch deep as early as possible in spring, then thin seedlings to stand 4 to 6 inches apart in all directions. If you are starting indoors, give transplants 6 to 8 weeks of growth before they go out, and set them out once frost danger has passed. Chives are a cool-season perennial and the seed is slow, taking four to six weeks to make a transplant, so an early start is what buys you a harvest the same year rather than the next one.

One light spring feeding, and only if the clump is weakening

Give the bed a very light application of a 5-10-5 fertilizer once each spring. Container and indoor chives get a liquid fertilizer at half the label strength every four to six weeks instead, and nothing at all through winter. An established clump lives off its own bulblets and rarely needs feeding, so the spring application is a correction for a plant that has visibly lost vigor, not a routine. Overfeeding buys soft growth and weak flavor.

Split the clump every two to three years in spring

In spring, lift the clump and pull it apart into divisions carrying at least 5 bulblets each, and replant them 6 to 12 inches apart. Let the divisions reestablish for several weeks before you start cutting them again. The bulblets multiply underground until they are crowded shoulder to shoulder, and a congested clump thins out and quits producing. Dividing gives the younger, more vigorous bulbs room, which is why a regularly split planting outyields one left alone.

Cut the spent flower stalks at the soil line before seed sets

As the purple pompom flowers fade, cut the flower stalks right off at the soil line. Do this before the heads dry and shatter, not weeks later. The stalks themselves are tough and unpalatable, so they go to the compost rather than the kitchen. Chives self-sow hard enough to seed themselves through a bed, and a clump that is ripening seed diverts energy out of the leaves you actually eat. Cutting the stalks off ends both problems in one pass and pushes the plant back into leaf.

Check for thrips silvering the leaves in hot weather

In hot dry stretches, look down into the clump for leaves turning silver or gray, twisting, and dying back. That is thrips feeding. On a culinary clump the fix is to shear the planting to within an inch or two of the soil and let it regrow clean, which removes the infested tissue and the harvest in one cut. Thrips rasp the leaf surface and drain the cells, which is what leaves the silvered streaks. Chives are cut and eaten fresh every few weeks, so shearing is both the control and the harvest, and it sidesteps spraying a crop you eat raw.

⚠ Do not spray insecticide on a chive clump in flower - the blooms are heavily worked by bees. If you spray at all, only a product whose label lists chives or herbs is legal, and you must honor its pre-harvest interval.

Shear the whole clump low rather than picking leaves

Once the leaves are about 6 inches long, cut the plant back to within 1 to 2 inches of the soil with scissors, taking the whole clump rather than tipping the leaves. Expect three or four cuttings the first year, and a cutting roughly monthly in the years after. Chives regrow from the bulblet, so a hard low cut resets the whole clump to fresh tender growth at once. Leaves left standing keep aging and turn tough and fibrous, and tipping them only leaves you a clump of blunt old foliage.