OK, so we left you with a little cliff hanger yesterday! We’ve got plants! Like alive plants. (You all are probably like, “Duh, you’re growing them! We’ve seen the pictures.”) But we mean alive plants, in the ground! We’ve got our very first growth and greenery for the season!
Now, this isn’t really surprising to us. These are chives. And they are incredibly cold hardy, solidly zone 3 and are likely able to survive in many favorable zone 2 climates. We like to joke that if we ever colonize Mars that we hope the inhabitants like onions! ‘Cause they’re going to be eating a lot of chives!
If you’re a beginner grower and you want to start playing the perennial game, chives should be at the top of your list. They’re super easy to grow from seed, are very easy to maintain and will consistently produce for you even in some of the harshest northern gardens on earth. They will have a tendency to self-seed around them, so it’s a good idea to contain them a bit. Otherwise you’ll eventually end up with a hedge of chives. Which, some people may not object to!
Chives are just plain friendly to northern climates. From Oregon to Alaska, New York to Newfoundland, Italy to the tips of Sweden. Chives are one of the most universal northern perennials, spanning vast northern latitudes around the entire globe. (Or the top flat parts, in case you’re a flat earther, of course.)
While “technically” you should have started chives a month ago or so, they’ll likely survive just fine even if you sow them now. (Again, these seeds would be in our Mars bug-out bag.) It’s best if you can get a full seed pod and some early self-seeding your first season, but this isn’t critical to their survival. So, if this sounds good to you, get on it!
We talked about covering perennials with straw yesterday. We don’t practice this with chives and it’s not needed, unless maybe you’re trying to do them in solid zone 2a. We allow the chives to kind of collapse naturally in the winter, which in a way, is very much like our straw bed. We do clear this gunk out in the spring, being sure to shake any seed pods back into our chive bed first.
We’ve really only got a couple of plants that are roaring and ready to go this early in the season. It’s always a nice treat to see them, punctual and ready to get their summer on like we are. We snack on chives all the time, practically every time we swing by these beds. (Hmmm, maybe this is why our cat loves onions? Imitating his cat parents?) Chives are quite literally our earliest of garden snacks.
We are expecting some potential casualties with our perennials this year. We flirt with a lot of zone 3 perennials and we’re borderline zone 2b/3a. And we hit the limit between them this year. We’re eagerly anticipating what we’ll find, the suspense is palpable up here! One of them is now checked off the list, at least!
