Things to do with chives plus a surprise
Chives past their pretty stage
As I've mentioned before, I have happy chives. Come early spring, these chives burst forth with new growth before most everything else. All it takes is a few moments outside with scissors and I'm ready to sprinkle my scrambled eggs with chivy goodness. I've gone so far as to stop growing green onions and use chives instead. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), since they tend to spread, the amount of chives currently growing is way more than the amount of chives I use. So what should I do with my excess chives?
Digging all but one small clump up and adding them to the compost pile appeared to be the winning solution for a while – but I never got around to it (occasionally laziness pays off).
With their puff balls of purple on stalks of green, chives do have their moment of beauty. And as soon as they bloom, they are swarmed with pollinators which I consider a good thing. But, their flowers don't last long, soon they dry out and resemble yellowed tissue paper – not so pretty.
A few days ago I went out to dead head the chives with the hope that I'd get more harvestable leaves. With the first flower plucked, little black chive seeds spilled out (into my strawberry patch so no doubt I'll be weeding out new chive plants later). I have no need to start chives from seed as they easily divide into new plants, but come mid-winter I like to grow sprouts and chives make lovely sprouts. Their seeds are only viable for a year or so and often hard to come by for sprouting purposes.
The black chive seeds are ready to be shaken out
By the fist-full, I shook the flowers over a large bowl resulting in 75g of seeds (ironically, my last bag of chive seeds for sprouting was 75 g). Now I'm set for a winter of chive sprouts – and I'm still hoping they will put out new green growth for me to harvest.
Now for the surprise:
A baby goldenrod crab spider amongst the chive seeds
It also turned out that the chive patch was home to lots of little spiders. I kept having to stop shaking chive flowers to rescue spiders out of the bowl, then I spotted an adult – a goldenrod crab spider laying in wait for an unsuspecting honey bee. She was one of the prettiest spiders I've seen in the yard and patient enough to let me get some good photographs.
An adult goldenrod crab spider (probably female) waiting for pollinator prey
This is not the mother of the little spiders I found as after a female lays her eggs she stands guard over them, without eating, until she drops dead. As a cool piece of trivia, depending on the flower a goldenrod crab spider is waiting in ambush on, they can change colour between white and yellow, albeit much slower than a chameleon changes colour as the yellow pigments have to be fabricated taking 10 to 25 days.