Around the Garden

Random observations from around the garden:

While I love growing esoteric and under appreciated plants (see: borage, below), there's just something to be said about home grown tomatoes. They may be easy to grow, and as mainstream as can be, but they taste awesome:

One of the biggest surprises of the season has been watching our corn grow. For months it did nothing and then it sort of flowered and started producing silk. Now you can actually see the ears of corn growing. Corn on the cob is so familiar, yet as a plant, it's downright alien:

Finally, our borage is flowering. Even though it's clearly planted in the wrong part of the yard (in the shade, versus sun), it's still managing to eek out an existence.

The purslane I planted in an old prune container has been growing nicely. I've taken a few cuttings like the ones below and nibbled on them--they taste great. Next year, I hope to grow a real crop of this stuff, as it's quite tasty.

I come out this morning and notice one of the baby's breath plants arranged at this odd angle. Looking closer, I realize that a spider has co-opted the plant as anchor for parts of its web. The web and spider were quite impressive, but when I returned a few hours later to grab a proper photo of it, it was gone. Still, the 56 inch or so length of thread that held up the web is still there. Think about that: if the spider was half an inch long, it managed to construct and position a length of thread 112 times its size. That's like me constructing and suspending a 672 foot piece of rope; solo no less. That's astounding, and yet, quite common.