Kitchen Garden

SPRING ONIONS/CHIVES

Spring onions for spring. How very appropriate; though, to have them ready this month, the seeds should have been sown in September. However, if they are sown now and then every fortnight until June, there should be spring onions to be pulled throughout the summer months, maturing about nine weeks from sowing.

These members of the allium family – also known as salad onions and scallions, especially by Americans – require little attention. They should not need thinning, provided the seeds have been well-spaced, and are suitable for growing in a pot or a windowbox. Downy mildew is the only potential problem; you can best avoid it by not overcrowding the plants and keeping the soil free of weeds. White Lisbon is the most popular variety of spring onion, quick to mature and mild in flavour; Kaigaro is said to be resistant to disease; and Apache,

somewhat predictably, is red-skinned.

Welsh onions, and the weird-looking tree onions, also called Egyptian walking onions, are of the same family as spring onions. But chives are the closest, and most useful, relative: the green parts of spring onions are similar in taste to the chives' thin, green stems. Chives can be grown from seed but the better option is to buy and plant a clump and then divide it in autumn.

The great advantage of chives is that, once established, they keep going, year after year, requiring only to be cut back when they produce purple-flowering heads (which will also happen with spring onions if they're left in the ground). In my experience, chives are fit to be cut and used between the end of January and November, with a dormant period of little more than ten weeks.

I expect to continue enjoying our garden chives for as long as I can bend down to cut them. When I lived in the village of Chieveley in Berkshire, I was told that it was so named because the Romans planted quantities of chives there. True or not, the wild chives began appearing every winter on the roadside and the field edges.