Garlic Chive Plants

Growing Conditions

• Garlic chives are perennials throughout most of the United States, hardy in U.S. Department of Agriculture zones 4 through 8. The plants will grow in most soils and in partly shady spots, as well as in full sun.

  Harvesting the foliage for use in Asian recipes or other culinary purposes assures that the plants will produce fresh new shoots throughout the growing season. Cutting back also helps clumps continue to increase their spread.

Garden Uses

• Garlic chives not only provide clean-looking flat foliage, which creates spiky accents in your herb garden, but they produce showy, white flower umbels that make them attractive choices for ornamental plantings. Some specialty cultivars have light lavender blooms and variegated foliage that attracts attention even when the plants aren't blooming. Intersperse garlic chives with other perennials, use them as a tall groundcover or even grow them in containers.

Propagation

• Garlic chives are easy to divide or to grow from seed in either spring or fall. A good time to divide is right after you cut back foliage for culinary use. Dig out a section of the existing plant, or dig up the entire plant and carefully separate the roots into sections for replanting. For seed, watch carefully to harvest as soon as you can see the drying flower heads have formed seedpods and are starting to split open. If you wait too long, the tiny seeds will seed themselves.

Warnings

• Those attractive garlic chive flowers set many seeds, and if you let them scatter themselves, you may discover a mini-forest of new plants. These may be quite a nuisance if they spread throughout your herb garden, other planting beds or the lawn. Remove spent flower heads either before they set seeds, or cut off seedheads and dispose of in the trash, rather than your compost pile.

  Insect damage on garlic chives is rare, but Cornell University reports the first appearance of the leek moth on an imported Allium, in New York in 2009. The larvae of this moth damage Allium leaves.