For the past couple of years, I’ve started noticing small, onion-looking bushes all around the yard. First, they started appearing in the backyard, but lately, they started spreading outside the side yard, into the woods. We have here some wild onions and garlic, but these plants didn’t look like anything I’ve seen here before. I’ve pretty much been ignoring them, thinking it’s just some crazy grass that’s spreading but this year I’ve stopped to look closer and found myself wondering: Could these plants actually be Chives?

I’ve sown chives dozens of times in my garden and never had any luck with them. Sometimes they wouldn’t even germinate, and others plants would die off as soon as the summer started. I managed to grow chives just one time, 10 years ago. I’ve planted them in the small herb garden I was making around the forsythia bush, but since the roe deer considered this part of the yard their picnic place, I gave up on this garden and completely forgot about the chives there. Now, that I actually think about it these plants started spreading from this part of the garden, I just didn’t notice until they started multiplying in the side yard. 

The plant is growing in small bushes, the leaves are dark green, almost blue color, leaves are round and hollow in the middle. The older plants have a bulb on the bottom. I haven’t seen them bloom to see what the flower looks like, but I honestly can’t think of any other onion-looking plant that looks like this. We do have some wild garlic growing around the yard, but the garlic has that strong garlicky smell when you squash the leaves between the fingers. This plant doesn’t smell like this. It has a mild onion smell, but a very mild one. The leaves have that spicy onion taste, but I have no idea what the stem and bulb taste like. I’m not sure what this actually is, so I didn’t want to eat them.

I’m certain this is not Ramsons(Allium ursinum), the leaves on Ramsons are wide. Ramsons grow in the forest part of the yard, under the hill, and I know what they look like. I don’t harvest them since they are easily confused with Lily of the valley, and we have both here. The difference is best seen once they start blooming, which rarely happens here due to the lack of sun. 

The plants that are growing in the side yard are nothing like Ramsons, and they really look like chives to me. Could these actually be chives? If they are chives, I could actually have a whole year stash of chives right next to my yard.