I don't like the leaves, usually too tough, but I have heard you can sprout the seeds like bean sprouts, so I will be out harvesting seeds to sprout for winter salads.

The leaves aren't too tough when very young and small. I love chives in spring when their growth is just emerging, or even after they've been cut back and are just regrowing. They're pretty tender at that point. They grow so vigorously, though, that it is a mistake to let them go to seed. I used to have so much trouble with chives taking over my raised beds in the front garden that now I remove 95% of the ones that sprout. A long row of onion chives in bloom along one edge of a bed for several years around 2005-07 made people driving by think I was growing really lovely lavender, until they got close to the garden and realized the lavender blooms were only onion chives.

I cut about half of the clump off, snipped it in to small pieces and dehydrated them. I love them this winter, in omelets and stuff. :)

I have dehydrated the leaves and ground them into a powder.

Oldbusy that is what my daughter does too. I just love the green specks as well as the flavor. :)

Mine often stay green all winter and I just keep harvesting them, so I've never bothered drying them. I'll have to try that some time in case I ever have a winter so wet or so cold that the chives don't stay green and pretty.

Poverty brought me to my knees in the yard. We were food insecure. I discovered I couldn't even afford a $4 bag of nitrogen. So, I did some research. Today, I have a 25 lbs of worms constantly creating organic fertilizer as well as compost pile.

I am hoping to continue learning and utilizing permaculture techniques. My two young children who are now 7 and 10 are learning permaculture principles, gardening techniques and we are now embarking upon an entire permaculture existence from design which utilizes computer aided drafting, artistic skills for design, engineering for bio and mechanical schematics, administrative for logistics and scientific control, all types of weather science (which I'm still ignorant), soil conservation techniques, cook, canning, preserving, and, of course, saving seed. I'm even teaching them to meditate in the garden. Because I'm teaching them how to trade the stockmarket. That gets stressful.

Eventually, we'll apply other types of biosciences into the garden and use it to perform controlled studies for the sake of learning how to act like a scientist.

These are the ideals that run around my own lack of discipline, grandiose ideas and the stuff that life throws at us.

I don't write all this to brag, but to really show how today's technology and wealth of information is being applied to the wave of a future where people will be interested in self-sustaining systems or sustainability with common sense.

Sometimes I resent it. I resent my children's young lives are forced to acquire so much information from totally different seemingly unrelated areas - global and micro finance right along side organic gardening, e.g. But we live in a global world, though most of us don't feel it. And that network is getting stronger. I really hope to have my children confident. That's the goal, anyway. We can only do the best we know how with what we have. We have a wealth of information. It gets confusing, sometimes.