Last edited on 25 Oct 2026. View history
Chives
How to sow chives: Direct seed. If planting indoors, harden off before transplanting seedlings outside.
Sun requirement for chives: Plant in Full Sun
Chives are a perennial herb in the Allium genus related to garlic, shallots, leeks, scallions, and Chinese onions. They are grown for culinary and ornamental purposes. The scapes or stems are hollow and tubular and have a mild onion taste. They are one of the fines herbes of French cuisine and commonly used fresh. The plant forms dense clusters of slender 2-3cm bulbs, which can be cooked. Chive flowers are edible, star-shaped, and pale purple. Chives are a good companion plant because their sulfur compounds repel negative insects, and their flowers attract bees.
A plant grows with warmth, not with days. A growing degree day is one day's worth of useful warmth: how many degrees the day's average temperature is above the lowest temperature the crop grows at. Add them up from planting and you know how far along the crop is, whatever the calendar says.
Say that lowest temperature is 10°C. A day averaging 17°C gives 7 growing degree days. A day averaging 8°C gives none, as it is too cold for the crop to grow. That is why the same lettuce takes about 50 days in a summer and 90 in an autumn: it needs the same total warmth either way.
For chives, the FAO EcoCrop database gives a lowest growing temperature of 2°C and a shortest growing cycle of 70 days at its best temperature, about 910 growing degree days to a first harvest.
Where you've told us where your garden is, we use this and the weather there to predict when your chives will be ready to harvest. We don't use it for how long a plant lives or when it finishes: we go by what members have logged for that.
Only plantings by members who have set their locations are shown.
by shiny,
We've been rock and rolling with 7.7 Earthquake at midnight and i lost count of how many 6-pointer aftershocks - and a tsunami evacuation.
Super tired, this morning we went home for about 90 minutes sleep - and then went looking for something normal (instead of our wavy shaken up house). Sc…
artichokes
perpetual spinach
chives
by Cesy,
I've just uploaded some more recent photos of my plants. The parsley is still going strong, having seeded itself in a second spot along the box. One patch has died back a bit - I clearly need to pick it and use it more often. The chives have also died back a…
chives
aloe vera
by Skud,
I really should've got started on winter planting sooner, I think. Everything in the garden is in a lull right now. Although people near me are still blogging about the last of their crops from summer, all we have still going are some chillis and some basil. Lots of things …
zucchini
celeriac
chives
beans
lavender
pumpkins
A summary of nutritional data per 100g for Chives, raw.
| Energy | 120.0 kJ |
|---|---|
| Protein | 1.5 g |
| Fat, total | 0.3 g |
| Carbohydrate | 2.6 g |
| - Sugars | 2.6 g |
| Fibre | 4.7 g |
| Sodium | 7.0 mg |
Data from the FAO EcoCrop database for Allium schoenoprasum L.
| Family / Taxonomy | Liliopsida Liliidae Asparagales Alliaceae |
|---|---|
| Optimal temperature | 10 - 20 °C |
| Absolute temperature | 2 - 35 °C |
| Optimal rainfall | 450 - 1600 mm/year |
| Absolute rainfall | 300 - 2800 mm/year |
| Optimal soil pH | 6.0 - 6.6 |
| Absolute soil pH | 5.0 - 8.2 |
| Crop cycle | 70 - 100 days |
| Max altitude | 2000 m |
| Life form | herb |
| Life span | annual, perennial |
| Habit | erect |
| Optimal soil depth | shallow (20-50 cm) |
| Optimal soil texture | medium, organic |
| Optimal soil fertility | high |
| Optimal soil drainage | well (dry spells) |
| Optimal soil salinity | low (<4 dS/m) |
| Photoperiod | long day (>14 hours) |
| Optimal light | very bright |
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Photos
milki harvested 1 bunch, weighing 0.09 kg.
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