HOW’S YOUR GARDEN BY LOIS TRIGG CHAPLIN
These Chives Taste Like Garlic Years ago, I was introduced to garlic chives when visiting a Florida farm specializing in Asian vegetables. Instantly, this perennial herb that supplies garlic-flavored leaves year-round appealed to my love of garlic, and it has been in our garden ever since. The leaves are grown, harvested and used in recipes like onion chives, but for a garlic flavor. The flowers, which are in bloom now, give native bees and syrphid flies a fresh flower to visit at a time that beekeepers refer to as a dearth in the garden. As long-lived perennials, I soon learned that if left alone, garlic chives can reseed beyond their boundary, so it’s a good idea to trim back the flowering stalks when the seeds start to form.
look at the roots of spent vegetable plants in different parts of the garden to learn from their condition. Did the roots expand or do they seem stunted? Are there knots from root-knot nematodes? Are any of the roots soft and rotting? Are the roots healthy and vigorous-looking? This tomato shows a small cluster of rather twisted original roots at the very bottom of the plant in contrast with the vigorous roots that formed along the buried stem when the transplant was planted deeply. It was buried all the way to the top two leaves in the spring. In fact, most of the root system developed along the buried stem. Anything we gardeners can do to help our plants grow a good root system will help them through stresses.
SIMPLE TIMES
THE CO-OP PANTRY Garlic chives
Garlic chives are easy to start from seed, but even easier from a seedling dug in the garden of a friend, or started from transplants (it is sold by Bonnie Plants.) Fall-planted garlic chives will be fine through winter; they are quite cold-hardy.
Study the Roots Are you wilting yet? Your plants may be, especially those without a good strong root system to get water. At the end of the season, it pays to take a close
Tomato roots
August 2020
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