"I'm hungry but I don't want to eat plants."

I stopped at my brother's in Hanover to pick up his bicycle for my trip to the vineyard. Instead, I got my nephew Sam. We really tore it up for the couple days he was here with my mother and me too. Up at 6 am, in bed at 7 pm, and for those 13 hours, non-stop action.

Some highlights:

Feeding the horses using our flat palms (dandelions, violets, and dock).

Picking dandelions for dandy bread, and making it. And eating it. Sam didn't want to have jam on his because I wasn't and my mother wasn't, but then he tasted it: "I want jam on mine."

Sam and I took a bike ride along a nice easy bike path. Every time we went downhill he'd say, "Oh no I can't look I can't look," but I'd look back and he'd be looking. I guess he just likes to say that. I saw an old beat up car in the woods so we stopped to check it out and take a pee break, and then he piped up with "Hey...pea and pee is the same word." We have been talking a bit about peas lately since we planted some at his house and the beach pea plants are out too. No pictures of all this sam fun because my camera out of juice right when I opened it first day here. So I just fired up my webcam to snap me and Henry.

We did some good monkey swinging from the twisty tree in Cedar Neck Sanctuary. At some point when he got hungry, I think this was back by the horses, he came out with the soon to be classic: "I'm hungry but I don't want to eat plants." I'm not discouraged, he'll make a good forager. He helped my scrub in the ocean the evening primrose roots we found in Biddy's yard.

Whiffle ball and 'ping pen' and harmonica playing and lego building were our at home fun time activities. Like I said, we packed in the days really well. When 7 pm rolled around each day, I felt a certain sense of accomplishment, not to mention quite a sense of fatigue too.

Now we have Henry with us, but he's all Lorena's job basically, and he's doing just fine. We just got back from a walk around the woods here and found enough wintergreen berries to actually make it worthwhile to collect them. I've also sucked it up and just been making strawberry Japanese knotweed crisp. Although I'm still searching for the best savory preparation, I want to hook people in to wild plants, so I'm selling out and making the crisp. And, we were actually able to 'forage' the strawberries yesterday -- as we were leaving Stop and Shop, I noticed in the trash a big container of strawberries with one moldy one on top. I paused, looked around and snatched it. True foraged Japanese knotweed strawberry crisp.

Here's me, webcam: .