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| Milkweed host with caterpillar. These are bigger leaves than we remember. |
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Rollie checking out
some Fon du lac
grape varietals. |
We spent many long boring hours as youngsters pulling milkweed from our little farm pasture on Lake Andrew. Didn't know at the time that milkweeds are the preferred host for the monarch butterfly. Fortunately, there are still plenty of milkweeds surviving on our old place, including these being thoughtfully cultured by the present owner, Rollie Fernholz, in hopes of adding to the butterfly population. He says the caterpillar in this photo above will soon be a monarch (like the one in the file photo below), and spend the winter vacationing in Mexico.
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| Female monarch |
So what else is growing these days on the old pasture land where we ran heifers and played baseball? An honest-to-goodness vineyard. Rollie will be harvesting grapes from it this fall for stomping and bottling at the local Carlos Creek Winery. We'll explore all that when family vintner Sosie arrives here from the Napa Valley in September.
