You can harvest chives for seed when you start to see a few black seeds poking through the dry flowers.
This is a shot of chives for seed drying in our greenhouse.
On the top of the picture is our first harvest looking pretty crisp. The bottom was harvested about a week later.
We got a lot of seeds out of these plants.
I thought it would be more seed than we could sell through packet sales in one year.
Turns out I was wrong.
Folks are buying a lot of seed these days.
I bet you’ve seen all the back orders on your favourite seed company websites.
It’s at times like these that I remember the value of growing a bit of seed on your farm.
I know market gardeners have a lot on their plates in the summer months, the garlic harvest, the tomato harvest, the onion harvest, all that other harvest. And those weeds that didn’t get the memo that they were supposed to stop growing on August 1.
But what if you decided to save seed from 1 crop this summer?
Just one?
Maybe from those chive plants you didn’t harvest? Or from some hot peppers that you’re growing anyway?
Or …
It might be a small step towards a seed system overhaul but it’s the first step to become a seed saver.
p.s. Now, all I’m suggesting is that you save one crop for seed. I’ll be writing this winter about what seeds would be easy to save in your market garden.
But if you’re feeling keen, and you want to jump in a little bit deeper, here is one my 2019 blog posts called What Seed Should You Save?