Garlic Chives

Hi, Dirt Farmer Jay here today. We're going to talk to you about chives and garlic chives. In this particular situation, I have plenty of garlic chives. I'm going to show you how hardy these plants are, how enjoyable they are, how easy they are to propagate, and that they should be contained. As you can see, they're going to be a little invasive. I'm going to go ahead and have Dirt Farmer Maggie zoom in a little bit down here and show what's going on here. Here we have a bed of garlic chives. If you look and see, these actually came from one clump originally that was right in this area. Over three or four seasons, it's really grown out. Garlic chives, depending on whether you like them or not, you could think they're either your best friend and the easiest thing to propagate or they're really bad neighbors and they're pretty invasive. Let me show you a little bit about what self-seeding does here. When these plants grow up, this is early in the season, it's early spring, but right there, and I think Maggie may be able to pull in right there, right there is our very first scape that is on the top of one of these stalks here. The rest of this bed, as it matures through the season, these stalks will become increasingly, increasingly less tender and more woody. As they mature, remember the plant, what it's trying to do, it's trying to create next generation. It's going to put those little seed pods on the top, which create these hard, dark seeds, which at the end of the season, just simply fall out of the pods and self-seed. Let's look back down here. When they self-seed, this is actually all from last year. You may think that it's just a little grass and that sort of thing growing in here, but these are actually garlic chives that are volunteer plants for next year. They're going to just grow right up there. Now, if you want to make use of these, because they are delicious, I enjoy them on baked potatoes or great to put on a pizza, anything in a soup or stew that you want some garlic taste and a little color in it, when they're in their tender stage, they're wonderful. Let's first of all show you how you harvest them. Then I'm going to show you how you can plant them, either from the seed or by dividing and those sort of things. There's a couple of things. Number one, if I pull them, I'm going to get out of here just a little bit. Here's one set that I pulled up before from one of these bunches here. As you can see, very robust root system. I could do one of two things with these right now. I could either go in and use them in a culinary setting simply by cutting this off, cutting some of the stalk, taking off some of the sheath, some of these areas right here, dicing this up, and it's going to be a wonderful aromatic addition to my dish. They fry up nicely. They're nicely added into other things, as I mentioned earlier. I could do that with this set of bunches right now. The other thing I could do also is simply take these right now and transplant them. I could put them back in about the white line where the green is, plant them in, let's say, a couple inches apart, and I could start it all over again. Now, to reduce the problem of invasiveness, this is a great potted plant. You can put it in something that's got a container, a five-gallon bucket with the bottom cut out of it and semi-buried, an inverted tire, some other large flat container, so that the seeds and everything are back into this area. If you want to let them self-root and all that, you can do that, but keep them contained. Notice they're not going to grow by going sideways with roots. They do it by raining down new seeds. So if you've got soil around your potted plant, you're just going to get more there as well. Just be careful of that. But these are very attractive, as you can see. Now, here's another way you can use them. Simply take yourself a pair of scissors and go out into the garden. As you can see, I've actually done some of this already, but here's a set right here. I can just take that whole area and cut that off. As you can see, it's very tender. Oh, that is a fantastic garlic smell. I can prune off some of that right there. I'm lazy. I like to do some of my food preparation right in the garden as I go. So I can take the scissors. I'm going to grab myself a plate. Watch this. We'll see if you can zoom in closely here. Here's just a quick tip. I just cut them right there as I go. As you can see, very quickly, getting a full set of really nice additions. Chives to put right onto baked potatoes, add to the soup. This is wonderful on top of potato soup, that sort of thing. Okay? Enough of that idea. I can just cut that all up. The other thing I can do with these really quickly is I can dehydrate them, put them in my dryer, and then just dry pack them as well to use them over winter, which is a great addition as well. Now, let's look at one other thing, and that is how do you propagate these? We've already said you could do it by taking those bulb divisions and just directly planting them, but there's one other thing, and that is if you let the plants mature and they do end up with the seed pods on the top, then what you can do is simply let those harden and collect those seeds and plant them in a grid the following season in your soil, your prepared bed. This is what those seeds look like. You can see I just captured some of these here. We have a little interloper here that's here with us that's enjoying the garlic as well. Anyway, here is the seeds are actually very easy to handle. As you can see, they're black, they're grainy, they're easy to work with, and you would simply pepper those in there in a bed that's prepared, and the general rule of planting depth is just 2 to 2 1⁄2 the diameter of the seed is the depth you want to go. So you can see if I planted those at 1⁄8 to 3⁄8 or 1⁄8 to 1⁄4 of an inch deep and just barely firmed them over, they'd do quite well. All right, that's a primer on chives and garlic chives in particular. Thank you for watching today. If you like what you saw and it was helpful to you, like the video. Even better, subscribe our channel. And if you have any comments or questions or insights to offer, make sure you write in. And also let us know what other material you're interested in and you'd like us to cover. This is Dirt Farmer Jay. We'll see you the next time around. Thanks for watching.