Probably more than you ever really wanted to know about flax...

I mentioned a long while back that I tried growing some of my flax seeds "just to see" what they would turn into.  I think flax is pretty fascinating because of its health benefits and its historic usefulness (linen is made of flax).  As it turns out, they have very pretty flowers.

Flax flower - I'm growing mine in a pot, they are probably 18 inches tall, I think they get about twice as tall in a field.

After the flower falls on, there is a "capsule" that swells and that is where the seeds are.  We've broken some open and I'm not sure how to tell when they are mature, but each capsule has about 10 seeds in it.  Each plant has 3 or more flower/capsules at the top. 

It looks like the threshing process is pretty involved, so I don't think we'll be making linen around here!  Although I am very curious about how the stalks will age.  I am a geek, aren't I?

The rest of our garden is doing ok.  Our new neighbor weed-bombed his yard and it leaked into our yard and killed the tomato plant :(  But actually that encouraged me b/c at first I thought I was just extremely bad at growing tomatoes!  We have little carrots - they are very cute, but not ready yet and a pretty good showing with our peas.  Our backyard gets limited sun this time of year and about half of it gets no sun at all.  Our front patch gets no sun except for the sunrise.  We will make up for all of that in the summer!


*****

Here is something completely different.  For just about ever I have overhead people gushing about how great Les Miserables is - the musical that is.  My parents saw the movie version and they liked it, but said it was kind of hard to follow since they were unfamiliar with the story.  That made me curious, but I don't want to see it without reading the book first...so I requested it from the library.  When I went to pick it up, the rubber band holding the hold tag onto the book was about to pop, this thing is ENORMOUS.  It is more than 1200 pages long and the type is small.  There is a very grim photograph of Victor Hugo on the cover.  I want to know - have any of you ever read this thing?  Am I going to be glad I slogged through twelve hundred pages?  I've read enough to just barely be able to see pages in front of the bookmark - and that's take me about 4 days.  I know I'm not really into the story yet because the main character (according to the book flap) hasn't even shown up yet.