Closely related to onions and garlic, chives are the perfect beginner’s herb.

The hardy perennial is full of vitamins A and C, and they taste great. Even the flowers are edible. Use chives fresh; freezing turns them to mush; baking to crispy brown sprigs.

Chives grow from bulbs in clumps of grasslike, onion-scented hollow leaves, pointed at the tip and usually about a foot tall. In midspring, on stems roughly the same height, the plants produce balls of tightly packed lavender blossoms.

Hardy throughout the United States, chives can take sun or partial shade, and almost any soil, although they like good drainage. Chive seeds need temperatures of 75°F (23°C) or less to sprout, which takes two to three weeks. They’re pretty sleepy the first season, so only take a snip or two.

A better approach is to buy young plants or bulbs, or find a friend who’ll dig you a clump or two. Set each clump (six to ten bulbs) 8 inches (20 cm) apart. To bring chives indoors for a short-lived winter crop, dig a small clump three or four weeks before your first expected frost. Pot it up but leave it outdoors for a couple of months in a protected location to go dormant (the tops should die back). When you bring it in, the bulbs will think that it’s spring and send up shoots.

You can harvest all the leaves from a clump at once as long as you leave about 3 inches (8 cm). Divide clumps every three or four years.

Don’t let grass like weeds get near them, or you may not be able to separate the good guys from the bad guys.