Garden Bounty 2009: Surprise Fruit

I'm reading this really fascinating book right now called The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession by Adam Leith Gollner for a review I'm going to write sometime in the near future.

In chapter 1, I came across an interesting piece of information: spinach is a fruit-bearing plant. Once the plant flowers, it develops a "miniscule, often prickly, fruit capsule." Well, it just so happens that I have an abundance of flowering spinach in my garden, so I decided to go and investigate.

Lo and behold, I find my spinach bearing tiny berry-like fruits a few millimeters long.


If you're thinking this might be the next culinary find, think again: these are barely edible. Even at their size, they are really fibrous and difficult to chew. They taste vaguely of spinach, and vaguely of not much else.

I picked a stalk of spinach and brought it inside because I wanted to see the seeds. With the point of my knife, I plucked off a couple of the seed capsules and split them open. The seed is barely visible, but it's there:
Well, who'd've thunk it? The garden isn't a total loss - I am learning some new things. Did you know that arugula produces some very interesting flowers? Check these out:
Interesting, eh?