Beltane Garlic Moon
Kate picked strawberries and rhubarb yesterday. Two pies later we still have a plastic container filled with strawberries. We have two separate strawberry plantings, the ones that are only June bearing have not begun to mature quite yet.
With well over 150 apples and four pears bagged over the last three or so days, the currants, blueberries, cherries and plums still come and the raspberries arriving in the fall, we’ll have an abundance of fruit this year and for years to come.
We’ve also had asparagus already, are eating green onions and small shallots now and I had a sandwich filled with young beet greens. Though we’d starve if we had to depend totally on our own produce, still we grow more and more each year; the variety of what we grow has lessened somewhat as we get more intelligent about what it makes to sense to grow and what to buy.
This morning we got up early and drove over the Red Ox, a real old timey restaurant and had breakfast. When the waitress asked if we’d like homemade bread, we said sure and I asked who makes it? Robin. She’s here 7 days a week and she opens and closes five. Wow. That’s a lot. She must like it. The waitress gave a low chuckle, Yeah or she doesn’t like it at home. That’s what I’m beginning to think. Made sense to me.
After breakfast we drove over to the Cedar Creek Nature Preserve, a University of 
Minnesota outdoor lab and nature center that trains ecologists, botanist, biologists, entomologists, herpetologists and the like. It’s usually close to the public, but this weekend they’ve partnered with the Bell Museum to put on naturalist oriented programs for an evening and a day, last night and today.
We went on the snake walk. Our guide, Brian, a totally hairless biker, knew a lot about snakes. He works as an engineering tech for a pharmaceutical company, but spends his off years hunting for and tending snakes. The picture to the right is a bull snake, a rodent eater.
They are, apparently, mistaken for cobras because they fan out their head when threatened. (Why anyone would fancy a cobra in Minnesota is beyond me. But, hey.)
A walk along a shaded trail produced a sighting of a prairie skink. It released its tail after capture, the tail continuing to wiggle, looking for all the world like a tasty earth worm. Clever trick. Sacrifice some body mass and live to eat another day.
This snake is a prairie garter snake, identifiable by the black stripes down from its mouth. She looked gravid.
Anyhow, the outdoors providing a lot of the entertainment this week with the transit of Venus, fruit and bee tending and Cedar Creek today.
