Growing Chives Outdoors: Cutting Back, Dividing Clumps and Garlic Chives
A chive clump keeps making new plants all season, so cut it hard, divide it every few years, and take the seed heads off garlic chives.
Plant one small pot of chives in a sunny corner and within a few years you’ll have enough to share with the neighbours. That generosity comes from how the plant grows. A chive clump is a colony of small plants joined underground, and it keeps adding new ones through the growing season.
That one fact explains most of the care. A clump cut down hard regrows a fresh flush, a crowded clump grows more strongly once it’s split, and the main thing to manage is seed, especially with garlic chives, the flat-leaved relative that flowers late and sows itself freely.
Our windowsill guide covers chives indoors. This one is about the clump in the ground.
Why does a chive clump keep getting bigger?
Because each plant keeps splitting. A 2013 review of chive biology in the Polish journal Annales Horticulturae describes buds forming on a short underground rhizome inside each mother plant. As they grow, the plant divides, up to eight times in one growing season, so a single clump can end up with more than 100 plants linked by that rhizome.
The same review notes that the dividing stops when the plant enters its rest period, and that the timing and length of that rest depend mainly on temperature and day length, which fits the autumn die-back gardeners see.
How hard can you cut chives back?
Down to a few centimetres, and there are two kinds of cut. The everyday harvest cut takes leaves low and often. The renewal cut, which the Royal Horticultural Society suggests after flowering, takes the whole clump down to about 5 cm “to stimulate a flush of fresh foliage” that you can start picking again in a few weeks.
The US guides give inches, which we’ve converted to centimetres in this table.
| Source | Harvest cut | Renewal cut | Divide every | When to divide |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RHS | Snip regularly, no height given | About 5 cm, after flowering | 3 or 4 years | Spring or autumn |
| Utah State University | Within 2.5 to 5 cm of the soil | Not given | 2 to 3 years | Spring |
| University of Illinois | About 2.5 cm above the soil | Not given | 2 to 3 years | Early spring |
Utah State adds that after the first year, plants can be cut back monthly. Illinois says frequent harvests prevent the leaves becoming tough and encourage new bulblets, and that plants harvested often benefit from extra fertiliser during the season.
When should you divide a clump?
Every two to four years, depending on the guide. The RHS and Illinois both give crowding as the reason, and dividing keeps plantings “vigorous”, in Illinois’s word. Utah State adds that plants are most productive when divided regularly. Spring is the time all three name, and the RHS allows autumn too. In the Southern Hemisphere, spring runs from September to November.
The RHS method is to lift the clump, pull it into several smaller clumps and replant them straight away at least 15 cm apart, at the same depth they grew before. Illinois suggests each division hold about four to six bulbs. Utah State’s one caution is to give new divisions several weeks to settle before you start harvesting them again.
Are chive flowers edible?
Mostly yes, though the guides differ on taste. The RHS lists the purple flowers as edible, and NC State Extension says they have “a mildly bitter flavor” and can be eaten in small quantities. Utah State, by contrast, calls the “small purple flowers and stalks” unpalatable.
The RHS and Utah State agree on the stalk, which the RHS calls tough and advises snipping out at the base. For eating, the RHS suggests picking newly opened flower heads and scattering the tiny individual flowers over salads, for colour and a mild onion flavour. Try a few and let your own taste decide.
Flowers left on the plant will set seed. Illinois warns that chives “can self-sow and overtake a garden” unless flowers are removed before they fade, and it lists a cultivar, ‘Profusion’, whose flowers are sterile and don’t produce seed.
Chives feed pollinators across two seasons
Chives flower in late spring and summer, and NC State notes they have “a high nectar volume” that makes them well suited as pollinator plants. Garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) bloom later, in late summer and autumn, and the RHS includes them in its Plants for Pollinators list. Grow both and the bed offers flowers across a longer stretch of the year. Exact timing varies with climate, so watch your own plants.
How are garlic chives different?
They look and grow quite differently. The RHS describes garlic chives, also sold as Chinese chives, as forming larger clumps of flat leaves 40 to 50 cm long with a mild garlic flavour, topped by starry white flowers that are also edible. Common chives have what Illinois calls “round, hollow leaves” and, in its words, “round, pink flowers.”
The bigger difference is how they spread. NC State says garlic chives spread “readily by self seeding and underground tuberous rootstocks”, and suggests a pot or a naturalised area. Susan Mahr of University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension writes that the plant “self seeds very readily and produces seed prolifically” and “can be invasive under some conditions”. Her advice is to cut off the flower stalks as soon as blooming finishes. Seedlings are easy to pull while young, she adds, though there can be many of them.
How weedy it gets varies by place. An independent Missouri plant atlas says it only sporadically escapes cultivation there. The Australian National Botanic Gardens’ plant image index labels it naturalised, with a 2009 photo of it as a weed in the gardens’ Canberra grounds.
What happens to chives in winter?
They die back and regrow. The RHS says outdoor chives can be harvested from late spring until they die back in autumn. Illinois calls chives a “hardy, drought-tolerant perennial” and Utah State calls them cold-tolerant, so in cold-winter regions the clump stays in the ground and comes back in spring. Garlic chives also die back in cold winters, while in warmer climates, the Wisconsin article notes, they stay evergreen.
A note for pet owners
The ASPCA lists common chives (Allium schoenoprasum) as toxic to dogs, cats and horses, with signs including vomiting and damage to red blood cells. If a pet likes to graze in the herb bed, keep chives out of its reach, and contact your vet straight away if it eats some.
What this means for you
- Cut hard when the clump looks tired. A renewal cut after flowering brings a fresh flush within a few weeks.
- Divide every 2 to 4 years in spring, into divisions of a few bulbs, and share the spares.
- Eat the tiny flowers, compost the stalks, and remove flowers before they fade if you don’t want seedlings.
- Deadhead garlic chives promptly, or grow them in a pot.
- Expect winter die-back in cold climates, and new growth in spring.
Have you shared divisions of your chives, and have garlic chives ever seeded through your garden? Hit reply and tell us.
How we made this: AI tools helped us research and draft this post. We checked every figure, quote and link against its original source before publishing. Figures are as of 8 November 2026.
Grown with intention by Dynamic Nexus Garden.