Garlic Chives

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take a break this week from lilies.  I still have a few to show you, but a pattern break is in order. I’ve put this blossom off a couple of weeks, and one more week will be too late.

The only thing better than blossoms in the landscape is blossoms connected to something edible, even if you don’t eat it. This week’s pics are just that. A solid clump of garlic chives anchor one corner of our little kitchen garden. This eighteen-inch high herb has resided there for over a dozen years, undisturbed, growing slowly. It does tend to scatter seeds around, attempting to start colonies outside its original sphere, but the missus and I won’t allow it.

Garlic chives are the corresponding bookend to regular chives. Your common garden chive—the kind you chop fine and sprinkle over a lavishly-buttered baked potato—is a spring beauty, and the blossoms are even edible. The purple pom-poms can be broken up and sprinkled over a tossed salad to add color while lending a hint of, well, chives. The foliage is tubular, and the clump multiplies by bulb offsets. Even if you only have room for a couple of tomato plants, you need to squeeze in a clump of chives somewhere. I think we posted a shot of chives earlier this year. Check the gallery out and see for yourselves.

Garlic chives are just like the regular chives, but different. They bloom in late summer, not spring. As far as I know, the blossoms are edible, but I don’t know if they are prized as such. The blossoms, though quite beautiful, are too large and open to be considered pom-poms, and the foliage is flat, not tubular. The clumps enlarge by way of bulb offsets, but their main means of escape, as I have already mentioned, is that they readily multiply via seeds randomly scattered in the early fall. You really should make room somewhere for this clump too, but for the life of me we almost never use garlic chives. That is what garlic is for, for heaven’s sake. I guess what I am trying to say is that we grow it because it’s a tidy little garden herb that sports a mass of beautiful white blossoms in late summer when the rest of the vegetable garden is a bit drab. And the bees love them too.

Enjoy God’s beauty outside this weekend. Dig in the dirt, pull a few weeds, and by all means, plant something. See you Sunday.