My chives are the only plants left in my lush, expansive garden. Here they are, not so lush anymore, and with flowerstalk stumps everywhere. Ironically I eat more baked potatoes during the winter than the summer when they're growing well.
The tomatoes died to the last cold snap. :( Now that I have some clue what I'm doing with them, though, I'm looking forward to the next growing season.
5 comments:
I love fresh chives.
Our growing season is buried under some snow. Although the thingie on my computer says Sunday it will be 41F in these here parts. Time to break out the shorts!
This would be a good time to thin your chives/pull out any dead or brown stalks.
Chives will overwinter here, so I'm guessing with your long growing season, they'll come back with a vengeance once it gets warm.
41F in these here parts would mean it's time to break out the heavier jackets and start wearing socks again. ;)
Michelle: is there anything special I ought to know before I just start pulling on things? Or is it as simple as it sounds?
My only caution would be that since it's in a pot, be careful pulling. :)
What I do is grab the shears and hack off anything that looks dead or run my fingers through the chives, trying to catch my fingers on the dead stuff and pulling it out. (That's not precisely what I do, but it's a close an explanation as I can come up with.)
Chives are quite hardy, so even if you pull off a lot you should be fine.
Once it gets warmer, you may want to check and see if they're root bound. IIRC, you can split them at the roots, but I'd have to check.
Also, IIRC, this may be something you'd want to wear gloves for. (Assuming it was you that had issues with touching some kinds of plants?)
Anyway, if you pull out the dead stuff, it'll make room for new shoots to come up.
It turned out that most of the flowerstalk stumps had new leaves growing out of them, so I left them there and just pulled off all the dead leaves. Now I can see soil in the middle of the clump. :)
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