Today my Kansas garden corner is blessed with blue blooms. This Tradescantia is often known as Spiderwort. I love the fresh, blue blooms, which the camera can’t do justice to. In real life the blooms are a bright violet blue, which somehow the camera can’t capture. The contrast of blue flower and yellow stamens just draws my eye and I especially enjoy them because they are the first of the flowers to bloom in my Kansas prairie garden.
I know I read somewhere in a book which I borrowed from the library several years ago that spiderwort blossoms are good to eat. Please don’t take my word for it though – these things are tricky! I can’t even figure out which species of Tradescantia I have – I need to check my gardening journal. After searching around the web to try and find out more about edible prairie plants, I’m really not much the wiser.
I did find a fun set of YouTube videos all about eating weeds. Just to confirm how tricky these things are, I watched a video about edible milweed vine in which the vine, on the poor quality of YouTube, looked exactly like a vine I have here. How could this be edible though? Foragers beware! Monarch caterpillars use the toxins from milkweed to make themselves unpalatable to birds! I kept watching and learned that Dean was eating the fruits of the vine. My vines don’t have a fruit – just a seedpod full of downy seeds which I’m sure have other uses. I’ve often thought the seed silk could be spun or incorporated in handmade paper. Sure enough milkweed silk can be spun.
It’s so beautiful today, sitting in front of the computer really isn’t so attractive. I’m enjoying the weather before it turns hot. How is your garden corner doing? Which wildflowers are in bloom for you and are your seeds sprouting?
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Oh! I miss my spiderwort from my old house. It was just so lovely and we had tons of it. Maybe that’s a sign I should go find some and plant it around the new home? Hmmmm.
Otherwise it’s just been growing, growing, growing around here.
That is a gorgeous plant. Does it need full sun? Or might it survive in a couple of hours a day?