grape-o-melons

Crank was taking us on a bike ride through the hills in a part of town I didn't know. There were great views down into the city, and amazing trees in all the front yards. Hoffman reached up with a lacross stick while balancing Crank's laptop on the other hand, and knocked down a HUGE grape off one of the neighbors' trees. There were only a few ripe, and they clustered all over the tree like cherries. The grapes were the size of large honeydew, but pale red like seedless grapes. We eventually sat down in the front yard to start into our grapes, but Caroline and I had no idea how to start.

We decided to bite into the tiny hole where the stem started from, but when I did, I found a small group of long translucent millipede like animals. They seemed to live just in the core of the grape, and we hypothesized that they were the reason that these huge fruits were able to self-pollinate. We ate around the core, like a giant apple, and the grape flesh was delicious and sugary and perfect!

Later at the nature center we were prompted to check into the origin of the critters. So we approached a giant wall of tiny wooden drawers. The card catalog of all the plants in the area. It took us a while to navigate through all the tiny drawers stacked floor to ceiling, but we found our way to "grapes" and found stacks of cards as well as drawers full of tiny grape plants. The information on symbiotic organisms wasn't as detailed as we would have liked, but we found all sorts of other interesting facts out, and tasted some grape samples that were savory like olives.

The nature center also featured a time lapse video art piece of various animals eating their way through different things. One was humans walking past a wall of cheese and breaking off tiny parts till it was gone, superimposed over a video (scaled to fit) of ferrets eating their way through a wall of food. Chris and I watched others including ants and other insects eating their way through certain objects in super fast motion. The layering of scales was fascinating.