Garlic Chives

It's time to plan your spring garden and start making those lists of things to add.  My favorite January activity is making the garden wish lists.

Here's an herb that we love having in the garden.

Garlic chives:  Allium tuberosum.

You can use the leaves all year long, like regular chives.  It blooms white in late summer and spreads like crazy.  It's a beautiful filler in the herb garden.  

Alliums grow from bulbs and they include everything in the onion family.    The leaves and flowers are edible.    

They have star shaped florets at the top of a stalk that comes up from the bulb.   

Garlic chives grow easily from seeds or from divisions of clumps of bulbs from an established patch like this one.  

This patch in the corner of my lower herb garden started as a single plant.   Now we have garlic chives in the neighboring beds, too.    They're easy to pull out where you don't' want them.    We prefer to let them wander.