If you like chives, you'll have to try garlic chives. The same great mild onion flavor is imparted with a distinctive garlic scent and taste on these perennial plants. Both the flat, grasslike leaves and the 1-inch white flowerheads can be used in a variety of your favorite dishes, and the plant is an attractive garden presence that brings in bees and other pollinators while discouraging predatory insects from chewing up the vegetable patch.
Garlic chives offer long, slender blue-green leaves topped with wide, flattish white blooms. The leaves are best harvested young, and you can cut just what you need—the plant will regrow, and continual pruning of this kind keeps the flowers from setting too early. Left to its own devices, garlic chives will reach about 18 inches high and 8 to 12 inches wide.
The blooms are edible too on this perennial, and both foliage and flowers release that rich, evocative onion-garlic aroma. Very easy to grow, this plant will self-sow if allowed to go to seed, so remove the flowerheads in late summer or early fall if you don't want any "volunteers" next spring.
Grow garlic chives just as you would regular chives, in full sun and well drained soil. It grows quickly and easily.
