Purslane is a common weed of cultivated soils: it doesn’t compete well with grasses or other dense ground cover, and it loves nutrient-rich soils. I’m pretty sure we got ours through a load of compost or manure. We had been farming for seven or eight years and had never seen it, then one year there were occasional plants everywhere, and the next year it was firmly established.
They grow little yellow flowers in the centers of the leaf whorls, so between those and the reddish stems they’re a spot of festive color in the garden beds.
Both the stems and the fleshy leaves are edible, though not my favorite. They’re fairly tart, overlaying a green earthy flavor like corn husks and a sort of chalky aftertaste. A bunch of people like them, and I can see that they might be a nice note in a salad, but I find it an odd flavor combination personally.
We launched The Rosebush the other day, an unpaid “magazine” for long-form thoughtful articles on interactive fiction. There have been a few problems: I didn’t understand that the WordPress theme we were using managed the mobile and desktop layouts somewhat separately, and I missed that there were menus in a couple different places… oh well. Nothing major.
The strangest thing was that someone tried loading the RSS feed and got the pile of very creative and intriguing dummy titles that our primary web guy made up to test the layout. After I tested every way I could think of, he tried loading the raw feed in his web browser and got the correct one. So I’m not sure what his feed reader was doing? He hadn’t fetched this feed before. The dummy articles haven’t been on the site for at least several weeks, I don’t think. Is there some sort of caching proxy server somewhere? Maybe he’s on the same part of the internet as our other dev? Interesting.