A Crafty Beast in the Garden

It's that time of year where we're picking muscadines off our vine in the side yard garden.  Muscadines are a type of grapevine that grow in these parts.  They have thick skin and a lot of seeds, but the grape itself is very tasty.  I like to eat them sun-warmed right off the vine and spit the seeds on the ground.  We have many young muscadine vines coming up all over the place now.  Russ took one with him to his home and is adding to his vineyard.  He has his vines growing on a hurricane fence.  Our vine gets bigger every year and it is trellised on a cattle panel supported by two t-posts on the ends.  Russ was a horticulture major and explained to me that if we had pruned our vine properly, it would have made more grapes this year.  When the plant goes dormant, we'll give it a haircut so that we have a more abundant harvest next year.

I keep a watchful eye when picking muscadines.  Red wasps love to build their nests under the canopy of grape leaves.  They are hard to see and then when you reach in to pull some grapes off the vine, they fly out and sting you.  Last year I was fortunate to see the nest before they got me.  It was as big as a belt buckle and full of angry aggressive wasps.  In the old days, I'd cut a Dr. Pepper can in half and fill the bottom with gasoline and douse the nest with the gas.  It 'freezes' them instantly.  This method is a no-go for killing wasps around things we're going to eat.  It would not only kill the wasps, but would kill part of the muscadine vine, too.  So I put a generous amount of Dawn dishwashing liquid into a cup and swirled some hot water in the cup.  I through that on the nest and the wasps fell to the ground, unable to fly.  My leather boot put them out of their misery and I plucked the nest off the vine and stepped on it, too.

As I was searching for ripe muscadines and keeping my eyes peeled for wasps, I spotted this dude:

It's only a harmless garter snake, but it made me immediately think of Genesis 3:1 that says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.  And he said to the woman, "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"

We have numerous garter snakes all over the place.  They're small and slither under the French doors.  We have to constantly pick them up and throw them back outside.  They eat frogs, lizards, geckos, and worms.  All their favorite foods are around our house, so we're constantly in contact with them.  Sometimes, their desire to get into the house gets them in trouble.  Last week one got slammed in the French door by accident, suffering an injury not unlike the one mentioned in Genesis 3:15.

The serpent I saw in the muscadine vine, fortunately, did not speak to me!  I am under no restrictions from which tree (or vine) in the garden from which I can eat, so I continued picking a bowlful of delicious muscadines.