How to Grow Garlic Chives from Seed and Get Through the Slow First Year

Sow once the soil holds 60F, and expect to wait

Garlic chive seed germinates between 60 and 77F (15 to 25C), with the fastest and most even emergence at around 68F (20C). Below 54F (12C) it sits and does nothing, and seed that sits in cold wet soil for weeks often rots before it moves. The usual sowing windows are early to mid spring, once the soil has warmed past 60F (15C), or early autumn while the soil is still warm from summer.

Even in good conditions the seed takes ten to twenty days to come up, which is two to three times as long as most salad crops. Gardeners who assume the sowing failed and dig the bed over at day twelve are the main reason garlic chives get a reputation for poor germination. Mark the row, water it, and leave it alone for a full three weeks before you judge it.

Seed viability drops off sharply. Seed from two seasons ago germinates at a fraction of the rate of fresh seed, and there is no way to tell by looking. If the packet has been open since last year, sow it at double the rate and thin down to what actually appears.

Do not let the surface dry once during those three weeks. A single dry afternoon at the point where the root is emerging kills the seedling before it ever shows above ground.

Sow in clusters, not in a thin line

Garlic chives grow as a clump, and they are harvested as a clump, so there is nothing to gain from spacing single plants evenly. Sow four to six seeds together in a station and treat each station as one future clump. A cluster of shoots supports itself, shades out weed seedlings between the stations, and gives you a handful worth cutting far sooner than isolated plants would.

Sow a quarter of an inch (5 to 8 mm) deep and firm the covering with your palm. The seed is small and black and looks much like an onion seed, and it will not push through an inch of loose soil. Space the stations six inches (15 cm) apart, in rows a foot (30 cm) apart.

1. Prepare a fine, level surface Rake out lumps and stones over the top two inches (5 cm). Fine seed that falls into a hollow gets buried twice as deep as the rest, and those seedlings emerge a week late or not at all.
2. Sow four to six seeds per station Drop them into a shallow depression made with a fingertip, cover with a quarter of an inch (5 to 8 mm) of sifted soil, and firm. Space stations six inches (15 cm) apart along the row.
3. Cover the bed until emergence Lay row cover or damp newspaper over the row to hold moisture in the surface. Take it off the day you see the first threads of green, or the seedlings will stretch and flop.
4. Water with a fine rose only A coarse stream washes the covering off and rolls the seed into the low corner of the bed, where it comes up in a solid tuft. Use the finest rose you have, or mist twice a day.

Thin lightly, or not at all

Most seed crops need aggressive thinning. Garlic chives do not. Leaving five or six seedlings in a station is exactly the density you want, because they will fuse into the multi-shoot clump you eventually harvest from. Thin only where a station has come up with fifteen or twenty seedlings crowded into an inch, and then take it back to about six.

Snip the surplus out at soil level with scissors rather than pulling them. The seedling roots are already tangled together at three weeks old, and pulling one lifts three others with it.

Weeding is the real work of the first season

A garlic chive seedling is a single flat green thread that looks exactly like a grass weed for its first two months. That resemblance costs more first-year sowings than cold or drought does, because gardeners hoe the row clean and take the crop with the weeds. Sowing in marked stations rather than a continuous drill is the practical answer: anything growing between the stations is a weed, and anything in them is not.

Weed by hand, close in, and often. The seedlings compete badly and a bed left for a month will have grass and chickweed rooted through the young crowns, at which point you cannot get the weed out without lifting the clump.

Hoeing near young garlic chives cuts shallow feeding roots that sit within an inch of the surface. Pull weeds by hand within four inches (10 cm) of a station and save the hoe for the paths.

Leave the first year uncut

Garlic chives are a perennial that spends its first season building a crown and a root system underground. What you see above ground in year one is a fraction of what the plant is doing. Cut it and you take away the leaf area that is funding that build, and the clump stays weak into its second and third seasons.

The discipline is simple and hard to keep: no harvest at all in year one. In the second season you can cut two or three times, and by the third season the clump will carry four cuts and still come back. A bed that was left alone for its first year outproduces one that was picked at from the start, and the gap only widens.

The one thing worth removing in year one is any flower stem. Seed production draws hard on a young crown, and the seed itself is not wanted here. Snap flower stems off at the base as soon as you notice them.

1. Write down the sowing date and the station positions Sketch which row and which end of the bed you sowed, and the date. In three weeks the row is unrecognisable, and a year later you will need to know which clumps came from seed and which were divisions.
2. Record the date you first saw green The gap between sowing and emergence is your local germination benchmark. Next season you will know whether day fifteen means wait or resow, instead of guessing.
3. Mark the stations physically Push a cane or a stick in beside each station. It keeps hoes and boots off the crowns, and it tells you where to weed and where to leave alone.

Sowing in containers

Garlic chives grow well in pots, and a pot solves the weed-identification problem entirely because nothing else is growing in it. Use a pot at least eight inches (20 cm) across and eight inches deep. The roots are fibrous and shallow but they fill a container quickly, and a small pot dries out too fast during the three weeks the seed needs to germinate.

Sow six to eight seeds spread across the pot rather than in one lump, cover, firm and water from below by standing the pot in a tray. Overhead watering in a pot floats the fine seed to the edges. A single pot will support one clump for three or four years before it needs splitting.

Container plants exhaust their compost faster than plants in the ground. Feed a potted clump with a balanced liquid feed after each cut from the second year on, or the regrowth comes back thin and pale.