As floral noted, true chives have a hollow, cylindrical leave. Chives do smell like chives and garlic and onion chives smell like and taste like garlic and onions. Your plant looks like garlic, but I'm not certain if it's a hardneck or soft neck variety. Do you know? Also, my guess is that very little has probably grown in the pot. I've grown garlic for many years, always in the garden, never in a small pot, so I'm not certain how large the bulbs would get in such a confined space or if they would even develop at all. They really do not like to be "cramped" or crowded. Also, I don't see any garlic scapes. Scapes are tall flower stalks that curl around and around. If this is a hardneck variety, it would produce a scape before it was fully mature. Softneck garlic doesn't produce a scape but the bulbs are larger and need more room to grow and develop. If this was garlic that was sold to be cultivated in a warmer climate, it's likely softneck. Or, if you planted cloves from garlic you got at the grocery store, it was more likely than not a softneck variety. In general, garlic is ready to harvest when the leaves start to turn yellow and wilt. All of yours look green and basically vibrant. Even if garlic bulbs are growing in the pot, the leaves are saying that it needs more time. Garlic needs a pretty iong growing season. When grown from cloves, it's often planted in the fall and grown over the winter and harvested at the end of the following summer. Seeds can take 2-3 years to fully mature into a bulb. How old are your plants? Did you plant seeds or cloves? When did you plant them? Do you have any idea what kind of garlic it is? I don't think you have mature bulbs in the pot and I don't think you will get a usable, good sized bulb if you leave them in a pot that small. What you might do is carefully remove everything from the pot, tease away the dirt (you can rinse some of it away with a gentle stream of water from a hose), and see what you have there. You want to be gentle so you don't injure the root system. If nothing significant in the way of a bulb has grown, carefully separate the plants and move them into a garden or a much larger pot. Honestly, I've never grown garlic in a pot, but as long as the bulbs have room to develop and you meet their nutritional and water needs, there is no reason that I can think of why it wouldn't work. I grow everything else in a pot - lilacs, a hydrangea tree, roses, lemon trees, why not garlic??!! You will want a pot that is at least a foot deep and each individual plant needs 5-6 inches between it and the next plant and the side of the pot. If I were going to try to grow these plants in a pot, I would get a shallow plastic tub, put many, many holes in it with a nail or drill. Put in some good organic potting soil and dried manure, and replant. Garlic does need a very rich soil. Keep them watered but not soggy, and feed periodically. There are quite a number of web sites that can tell you about the specific needs of garlic.

Thanks for the information. Can alliums that have not started to die back be pulled and successfully cured now or is the water content just too high at this point? I started transplanting last evening from my ancillary beds. I made it through the shallots getting all the dirt I could. I know I lost a few plants as I did not dig deep enough to get all the roots. I will take extra care to protect the roots from sunlight. Details on specific varieties at end of post. Since transplanting will set them back so much, I will cover them with a shade cloth and make sure to irrigate and give them extra attention to help them recover. With the multiplying onions and shallots I am not so concerned with getting a edible harvest as much as getting enough to replant for the fall for next year. I have sort of written this year off for eating from the garden until after all the work is done in the backyard. Alliums always seem to fade here in July. I know it is related to the day length, but in the years of drought the harvest always seems to come a few weeks earlier (last year a full month) and if it rains I seem to get an extra week or two so hopefully the extra protection will allow the transplants to recover somewhat. I pulled a few of the smallest garlic plants and the cloves are of a usable size. I am thinking about culling the smallest plants which usually have the smallest heads and curing them. That would bring me down to about 140 heads of garlic to transplant and at least twelve of each variety. Even with a high transplant failure rate I should have enough to replant and the culls should provide garlic for the next year. The Prince de Bretagne Shallots are doing so poorly (very little top or bottom growth) in my first year growing them that I am confident I got all the roots of about a dozen plants. The Griselle Shallots had a larger root system and I had to make a decision for a few plants on which one to disturb the roots of. The bulb size is actually decent on the disturbed plants and if I could cure them so they would last to the fall planting the size would be similar to the size shallots that were planted. The Frog's Leg Shallots (Red) were monsters when I planted them. A few of these are likely lost as the roots seem to run very deep. These seem to be dividing very nicely with each planted shallot being 6 or more small sized shallots. Several clumps had soft rot so hopefully the rest will survive. I will keep these in pots even afterwards as I do not want to introduce a rot disease into the new garden. These will continue to be isolated for another year. Today I hope to tackle Winter Onions. Only the best clump as a few have started topsetting and I should be able to use those to get the bed reestablished. Also I hope to transplant some potato onions into a stack of spare plastic nursery pots using the same procedure as the shallots. And finally move the best two babbington leeks. These have done poorly for me so far, but better each year. I want to keep a couple around for another year or two to see if the pattern continues or at some point their performance levels off.

Minibot, don't give up. I'm just a newbie with garlic (never even tried onions ... yet), but you're not going to let those little bulbs scare you off, are you? I, too, have sandy soil ... at least that gives us the good drainage these bulbs need. Garlic, I am told, is an inefficient feeder, so needs a good soil, therefore you're going to have to work in some good stuff - compost, well-aged manure. We made a slightly raised bed, just to ensure good drainage and to cut down on the digging. Also easier to weed in spring; weeds = competition = smaller garlic. "... under a tree ..." concerns me, as I understand garlic needs plenty of sun. If it's a deciduous tree, you might not have a problem. Depends on how early that tree leafs out and the path of the sun (and, consequently, the shade cast by the tree canopy). I have to deal with some shade from tall deciduous oaks, but by the time the leaves grow to any size and are casting any shade on the bed, it'll be almost time to harvest, and the garlic will still get good, full sun from dawn until at least 1:00 p.m. (Just to be on the safe side, I planted the earliest-maturing varieties at the west end of the bed, which will get the shade first.) That tree is another good reason to consider a raised bed if you can manage it - your bulbs probably won't do well if they have to compete with tree roots. Eventually, the tree roots will make their way up into the raised bed, but by then you might have another plan in place. C'mon ... you've got much nicer weather to work in than we have here ... 27 tonight, with about 4" of snow still on the ground from the last storm and another 4-7" expected tomorrow night. Oh, and you can plant some of the garlic in a deep pot and either cut like chives or harvest in a few months, when they'll be like scallions ... at least, that's what I've read. What kind of onions and garlic did you get? Good luck, and please keep us posted. Diane (down the road I might be asking you for advice on orchids/tropicals)

Hank, I plant onions in late January to early February for harvest approximately 95 to 120 days later. You can harvest green onions from any variety of onions that you grow. I think you can harvest green onions once the sets have been actively growing for a month or so. A lot of people plant their onions only 2" to 3" apart in rows 20" apart, and then harvest every other onion as a green onion, leaving the onions that will grow to maturity anywhere from 4" to 6" apart. My favorite onions to grow are Texas Supersweet (1015Y), White Granex, Yellow Granex, Candy, Contessa and Stockton Red. This year I grew ten varieties of onions, and Sir Lancelot leeks. I have harvested all but two varieties of the onions and the leeks. I plant garlic in the ground in the fall and harvest it in the spring when the green tops turn yellow. If you ignore the yellow tops and don't harvest it then, new green tops will come out and you can leave it in the ground indefinitely, although quality declines after a couple of growing seasons, at which time you need to dig and divide the cloves. I have had success with both hardneck and softneck garlics, but think softnecks grow better overall. I have never tried growing ginger and don't know if the grocery store type is hardy here, or would have to be grown as an annual. I know that the flower garden type of ginger is only hardy to zone 9. Horseradish is HIGHLY invasive and should be planted in a heavy pot that is sunk mostly into the ground, with maybe an inch or two of the pot extending up above the soil surface, so the roots cannot escape and take over the entire garden. Of course, if the pot has drainage holes, the roots may still escape that way. Dawn