Weaving in the breeze

What is charmlessly known as the "back end" of my blog includes stats on which blog postings attract how many visitors, and I can confidently say from previous experience that this subject matter – spiders and spider webs – keeps the punters away in droves. In fact it sends them clicking away faster than you can say "boo" to a scaredy-cat.

And so I know that the arachnophobes have already all gone...

However, spider web aficionados, all seven of you, can enjoy the following two photos of our resident orb-weaver's magnificent work, captured this Easter Monday morning as it's perfectly sprinkled with fog's micro dew drops.

Our front garden is heaven for orb weavers, as the distance between the street tree and the roof of our verandah is about 6 metres, I'd guess. That's nothing for a confident orb-weaver to span. Beneath that main span of silk, its superb web, which is about 1.5 metres in diameter, wafts above our thick jungle of groundcover wattle bush, where no humans set foot. So, once built, a web can last for several days, until a bad storm brings it down or a goofy bird flies into it, leaving gaping holes which are then repaired overnight.

The web is incredibly strong, like a ship's sail. There was a slowly waking morning breeze as I took these photos, and the web acted like a pair of lungs, breathing in and out as the wind blew it back and forth in a steady, slow rhythm.

Where's the spider? Hiding in the bushes. It does its insect hunting at night, helped greatly in this task by the street lamp outside, and our house lights, too. By morning Mr or Mrs Scary-to-Arachnophobes (and insects) is not to be seen.

It's one of the pleasures of gardening, sharing it with all creatures great and small. And both Pam and I often marvel at the cleverness and beauty of spider webs. These large orb-weaver webs are the cathedrals of spider-dom, but all their creations show how nature gives each and every creature its own special talent that helps it to thrive and survive. The main thing the rest of nature asks of we gardeners is to let them be, as much as possible. Just stand back and admire by all means, but live and let live if you can.

Catching dewdrops

Whoever thinks we only grow vegetables in order to harvest and eat them is missing out on a lot of fun and pleasure. Sure, I eat the crops I grow, but in many cases I spend weeks just admiring them as plants well before their delicious grand finale in the kitchen. And this morning the Florence fennel was doing what it does best: catching dewdrops.

It didn't rain last night, but the sky was clear and our little
digital thermometer said it was 5.9°C around sunrise, which
is very cool for Sydney. After breakfast I headed outside for
my regular 'lap' of the 7m x 9m Ponderosa I call Amateur Land,
and the fennel was caught in two halves. On the shady side,
pictured above, all the dewdrops turned the plant into a green
sparkly candelabra filled with crystals. On the sunny side,
pictured below, it too was green, but misty, fuzzy and sun-loving.

Here's a flavour combo to try both in the kitchen
and outdoors. One green strappy leaf in front is
garlic, the pot in the middle is of freshly trimmed
thyme, and behind them is the florence fennel.

The fennel bulbs are finally getting to a useful
size. When small their flavour is softer, much
more pleasing than the pungent over-muscled
whoppers so often sold in the shops.

I like the way fennel cooks and changes in a similar way that onions do: if cooked long enough both onions and fennel sweeten and caramelise, changing flavour entirely from their startling raw bite. Pammy likes to slice fennel finely and mix it with fine potato slices, olive oil, salt and pepper, then bake it slowly until it's like a gratin that can be scooped out with a big spoon. It's sweet and delicious, just right for these cooler months. I also like to see fennel as a bit like radish, as a salad vegie, using just a little bit very finely chopped or sliced and tossed into green salads, to add a bit of bite. Not too much, but just enough.

Here in the garden, the main growing tip with fennel is to start it off from seed, in autumn preferably (here in temperate Sydney), but depending on how warm or cold your climate, that sowing time might vary. But the one thing that won't vary is the need to sow it from seed. Fennel belongs to a big bunch of fuss-pot vegies and herbs (carrots, parsnips, parsley and chervil most notably) which do best from seed, hate being transplanted, and which perform erratically at best if planted as seedlings bought from a nursery. 

Aside from the flavour of fennel in the kitchen, the other great reason to grow it is to admire its beauty, and on mornings like this there are few prettier dewdrop catchers in the business.