Making Spätzle

Spätzle: http://youtu.be/4BcPi8vy-n0 We've been gardening more and biking shorter distances -- mostly with Bungee, our rat terrier. This was a great year for tomatoes and peppers, many of which went into the sauce for tonight's meal. In this video, Dale makes German/Austrian spaetzle.

Monarch pupa

These monarch butterfly pupae are so splendid.  We have three of them now, and another likely to form today.  One failed part way through the pupation process yesterday, but there are still 13 more caterpillars eating and growing and looking good.

Going slow

Watch "Monarch caterpillar explores tropical milkweed." on YouTube

After retiring on April 1st, I resumed biking every day but added some time consuming other activities - - gardening and raising monarch butterflies.  The caterpillars came from Monarch Watch and are growing at a tremendous rate on tropical milkweed (Asclepias currasavica or blood flower).  Luckily, some local milkweed has also sprouted, because it turns out that the older caterpillars are avoiding the leaves on the tropical milkweed and eating only the flowers - - something about regulating the amount of the milkweed toxin that they need to accumulate, I guess.  They are happy to switch to Minnesota native milkweed though, so I think we should be able to get all of them to maturity without running out of food.