Borage bugs

Borage

My fascination with borage began last year when I read that as a companion plant it could improve the taste of strawberries and was good to grow with tomatoes as it confuses the moth mothers of tomato hornworms.  I was further drawn in when I read that the flowers where edible and that people froze them into ice cubes. And the interesting facts that they somehow taste like cucumbers  and that traditionally they were grown to ward off melancholy sealed the deal for me. I wanted a borage plant.

Never mind that they are suposed to grow up to 3 feet and be a foot wide and that is probably a third of the size of my balcony. The more research I did on the plant the more I wanted one. Borage flowers attract beneficial bugs that eat the nasty aphids! Borage flowers attract pollinators. Pretty flowers, awesome companion plant, and it atracts the good bugs – I WANTED!

Last year I tried growing a plant from seed with the tomatoes, but I think that the tomato somehow shadowed the borage too much and it died before it really reached its true leaf stage. And since for part of the summer I went away, I contented myself with my other plants.

But still the pretty blue flowers stayed in the back of my head.

Bees love borage

This year I thought that maybe what I needed to do was to start it early, that way I would give the young plant a better chance at growing big enough to transplant out.

It grew, yes. But I don’t think that borage is really one of those plants that you should start early. It has a really long tap root which makes it hard to transplant without damaging that root.

Regardless of a little rough manhandling when it was transplanted my baby borage did fairly well in the yucky early summer weather that plagued us in May and June. And then the sun finally appeared and the weather warmed up and my borage is in BLOOM.

I have it growing in a fairly small container in an effort to restrain its growth. I cannot have a prickly leaved behemoth taking over my balcony. It sits in the sunniest corner of my balcony all dainty-flowered and prickly-leaved bringing bees over to the tomato plants that live near by.

So explain to me, if borage is a companion plant to attract the beneficials, why the heck does my borage have aphids?

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What the…Siamese tomatoes?!

My tomatoes have finally set and I can definitely tell which are the Black Cherries and which are the Barcelona tomatoes. I keep a closer eye on the tomatoes than any of my other plants which is probably why I discovered the siamese  cherry tomatoes so early.

Many many cherry tomatoes

When the first one emerged I though: what the heck?!

Twin 1 - Almost full grown

When the second on cropped up I though: OK, what are the odds of that?

Twin 2 - Growing along nicely

When I noticed a third, I decided to google.

Twin 3 - Still has some growing to do

And discovered that it seems to be a bit of a normal phenomenon in the homegrown  tomato world. My google search for siamese tomato came up with 341,000 results (OK –  not all of them were really tomato related)! The first page was all blogs from home growers who were doing the same thing as me: wondering about their strange siamese tomato.

The phenomenon is actually called fascination or cresting. The technical explanation has something to do with the growing tip, growing in an elongated fashion and contorting the tissue of either the fruit, flower head, root or stem. It happens in many different types of fruits and even flowers. There are many reasons it happens: mutation in the growing cells, bacterial infections, mite or insect attack, chemical or mechanical damage. Some people even raise certain plans because of their ability to consistently produce fascinated flower-heads!

Fascinated Mules Ear Wildflower - from Wikipedia

I guess this is one of those things that you get to experience when you grow your own. There is no way that you would find the mutant, for lack of a better word, tomatoes in the grocery store. And that is what makes is so much fun. You can grow vegetables you would never find at the grocery store or realize that your fruit and veg doesn’t have to be “picture perfect” in order for it to be mighty tasty.

Take eggplants, for example, odds are that your grocery store only carries oblong  fat deep purple fruit. But there are so many different types of eggplants! Some are even white with stripes others are long and skinny and are more lilac than aubergine. And sometimes those varieties that you don’t see in the grocery store are even tastier!

And since I have 3 siamese tomato, and we all know that old wives tale about good things happening in threes, I am going to take my twinned tomatoes as a good sign.

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Bees, Borage & Lavander

I went out with J and my mom on a couple of Saturdays ago to the local community garden – everything seemed to be in bloom. J and I snapped pictures. My mom stole raspberries.

Cypress Community Garden by the old train tracks

I love that this community garden is located by some old unused train tracks . It is such an awesome re-purposing of empty land, particularly, in an area of town where having your own garden is virtually unheard of.

We found a patch of borage and tried for about 15 minutes to capture a shot of a bee sipping at the tiny blue flowers.

Pretty borage flower and busy bee

Of course, that lead us to a lavender patch where there we spent way to much time trying to capture a picture of a bumblebee. I had the “flight of the bumblebee” buzzing in my head the entire time I tried. It was impossible to predict where it would land or take off to next. The butterflies did prove to be easier to photograph.

I guess they like the way lavender smells too

The sun is now making a regular appearance here and it FINALLY feels like summer. I am sure there will be many more walks around the neighbourhood to envy look at the community gardens. Hurray for sunshine!

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