What's Eating Your Wild Chives?

Tiny pale yellow to brown insects, 1 to 2 mm long, that crawl down inside the open tip of the hollow tubular leaf or hide where the leaf bases bundle together at the soil line. Hard to see without slitting a leaf open. Populations build fastest in hot dry weather from late May through July.

Silver or whitish streaks running the length of the hollow leaves, sometimes with tiny black dots of frass tucked inside the streak. Heavy feeding turns whole leaves bronze and limp. Damage is cosmetic on a culinary clump because chives regrow from the underground rhizome after a hard cut, but the current flush of leaves is unsightly until the next regrowth.

Tiny pear-shaped insects, 1 to 3 mm long, in shades of green, gray, or black. Rare on chives because the sulfur compounds in the leaves repel them. When they appear, they cluster almost exclusively on the flowering stalks during the late spring purple pompom bloom rather than on the hollow leaves themselves.

A dense cluster of small soft-bodied insects gathered just below the purple pompom flowerhead. The hollow leaves stay clean. Damage is purely cosmetic on the bloom and does not affect the clump or its culinary leaves. Many growers cut the flower stalks anyway to push energy back into leaf production.

Almost invisible without a hand lens. Yellow-green to red-orange specks on the outer surface of the hollow leaves. Only show up on container-grown chives left to dry out for too long, especially clumps overwintered indoors on a sunny windowsill where the air stays hot and dry. In-ground chives almost never get them.

Tiny pale yellow dots running along the outside of the hollow leaves, then bronze patches that spread across the upper portion of the clump. Fine webbing strung between adjacent leaves in heavy infestations. Affected leaves stay attached but go papery. The clump bounces back fast once watering and humidity return to normal.