Date Palm with Spider

About three years ago, we bought some unpitted dried dates from the grocery store. And while we were eating them, Sam started looking thoughtfully at the pits, and asked, “If we planted these, do you think they would grow?” And I said something like, “I don’t know, but we can find out!”
So she planted five of them in some extra coffee cups, put them on the windowsill, and watered them about once a week. For one month, then two months, then three months . . . and then, all of a sudden, four of them sent up shoots that looked a great deal like blades of grass. All of them came up within about day of each other, so there must have been some environmental trigger telling them it was time to sprout. They grew agonizingly slowly for the first year, two of them didn’t make it and the other two took almost that whole time to put up a second leaf. After Sam repotted them, they went into a pattern where they basically went dormant from around October to May, and did almost all of their growing from June to September. As of now, they are finally looking like some kind of palm tree and not just like some random grass [1].
The soil has settled quite a bit in the pot, and in the large open space near the top, a cobweb-weaver spider has taken up residence. She has spun webbing from the pot to the palm that is practically invisible unless you catch the light just right, and is really hard to photograph. This is pretty much the best I can get:

And as for getting a picture of the spider herself, well, nuts. I can’t get in close enough with my macro camera without touching the web, which startles her enough to run off and hide in a little lair she has made in the soil. And if I come in with my TG-3 Point-And-Shoot, it insists on focusing on the soil instead of on the spider. So the best picture I have is this one, where she is just a little hovering blur (circled in red).

Anyway, I am pretty sure this is a juvenile American House Spider, which I have photographed a few times before when the specimen was a full-sized adult and the geometry was better. They look like this when they grow up:

Anyway, she seems to be doing OK in there, eating the occasional fungus gnat that comes up from the potting soil. It isn’t quite an ecosystem, but it is close.
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[1] Date_palms, and all other palms, are Monocots, which is the clade that includes “grasses and grass-like plants”. These are the ones that only put up one initial leaf when they sprout from their seed, as opposed to the dicots, which sprout with two leaves. Which is why our date palms looked a lot like a blade of grass at first.
The vast majority of trees are Dicots, and while palms are commonly considered “trees”, they aren’t much like proper woody trees, and evolved their tree-style growth habit independently of other trees.