Explain chives like I'm 5

[shaniahoo]

I'm incredibly new to gardening so please don't give me a hard time 😄I've planted chives from seed in a tray, they're growing quickly and it looks like grass now. Online instructions about how to plant them out talks about separating the plants, thinning the plants but doesn't say what a chive plant "is". Each one looks like a blade of grass, is each one of these a plant? Do I need to separate individual ones out and each one will have more leaves as it grows? Or do they remain as single stems and you keep them in clumps?
Sorry I feel like an idiot for asking this!

They grow like grass. So let the grass grow a little longer (about hand height). Then you cut from the bottom, take your blade of grass, then snip with scissors over a fried egg!

If you've sown them super super tight then you can thin them, so taking out every other for example. It just allows the ones you've left to grow stronger.

I have the same question and I'm pretty experienced in gardening. I should hope nobody would give you a hard time - if you don't know you don't know.

I've looked online and while some people say separate each blade of chive into its own separate pot, most say you can have a clump of them. I've got mine in a fromage frais pot and there are about five blades so I think I'm going to keep mine together but repot into a bigger pot. If I had 20 or 30 in a fromage frais pot I'd split them up into a few small bunches and pot each bunch into its own pot to give each plant more room.

Once they're outgrown the next size pot I'll plant the whole clump out in the garden.

I agree with thinning them out a bit- so taking every 2nd blade out and putting into a different pot if you have one.

One thing I wasn't aware of is that mine die back each year and comes up again in the Spring. I'm in South East England now, but when I lived abroad in a warm country- they never died back. In the UK- I almost threw the pot out, thinking it was all dead. It wasn't and came up in Spring, the little, grassy shoots are about 10cm already this year.

Gardeners World have a forum where I ask all these sorts of questions too, so don't worry OP for asking.

Each blade of grass is a plant. Remove the clump from the tray, shake off excess soil, hold the grass at the base and gently tease it and its root from the clump, working from the perimeter inwards. Use the handle of teaspoon to make a deep hole in new soil for the root in order to replant - spacing out according to packet instructions.

I never do anything with them and they look after themselves!

I leave them in clumps. The bees love their flowers!

Thanks all!

I had some growing quite happily in a chimney pot for a couple of years but last year found the pot empty and the chives growing in my flowerbed. I presume the seeds blew over there and the pot ones had had enough 😀.

Just plant the whole pot out into a vegetable bed or even the border ( they are quite decorative and not particularly invasive, not like mint). Tough as old boots, and self sow here, but not hard to pull out if they get into the wrong place.

Chives, onions, wild garlic, all the onion family, form a bulb from the swollen leaf bases to store food over winter. That allows them to die down, then get a good start next year. It’s the bulb you eat in onions, garlic, but chives you eat the leaves, so the plant can keep going till next year.