Category: Nature

General observations, generally during dog walks

My squash garden

Some time ago, after preparing a calabacín (here butternut squash, not zucchini) for dinner, I took the “guts” with the seeds, threw them in some dirt in a flower pot, and said dare you to grow!

They took up the dare, and before too long I found myself having to replant 35 seedlings.

Of the five or six I planted alongside the house, only one appears to have survived.

Butternut squash seedling

And I notice we have a volunteer avocado tree there as well, which needs a better location.

avocado seedling

A few months ago, when we had avocados daily, I tried starting quite a few of the seeds. None took. So here’s one apparently spilled out of the “compost” barrel (which never gets hot enough to actually compost anything), thriving.

This is why I don’t take gardening too seriously. If things want to grow, they grow. If I want them to grow, well, maybe. Still: time to get those babies into the ground!

 

The little things: baby paltas

Baby avocados: the beginning of our third harvest.

baby avocados, Uruguay

Baby orange — first time from tree #1:

Baby oranges — first time from tree#2.

This is what our avocado trees looked like in August 2015:

Avocado trees, Uruguay

Note the large pine tree in the background to the right. It’s still there now:

Avocado trees, Uruguay

The two little orange trees are front right. I had to transplant them from the country because wind and hard soil there were just too much. It’s taken them a long time to get comfortable here. Very cool to see fruit starting to form!

 

 

Yellow flower season

yellow wildflowers, Uruguay

Well, that’s what Syd called it. Season? Maybe a couple weeks? Couple days? But lots of bunches of yellow flowers in the sandy scrubland where we walk with dogs almost daily. A few weeks ago it was purple flowers on ground-hugging succulents, but they’re past now. And I didn’t take a picture.

For some reason, I expect it would benefit me — or at least be interesting — to pay more attention.

 

 

Close call for a cutter ant

Leaf cutter ants are annoying. They’re worse than annoying; they’re horrible. They can strip a tree of all its leaves overnight, as I have seen more than once with young trees I have planted in Uruguay.

At the same time, they are rather awesome to watch up close.

Leaf cutter ants in action, Uruguay

We were particularly impressed with a procession of fresh eucalyptus harvest that crossed our path today. Check out the ant with the flower in particular.

And check out how close he came to not making it across the path!

Much’ agua

While watching organic fruits and vegetables harvested to order today — lettuce, swiss chard, celery, carrots, arugula, grapefruit — from the greenhouse I noticed something I’d never before seen to the east: water.

Not the ocean, but the Río Solís Chico. I asked Ricardo about it. Sí, hay much’ agua. So I had to check on our tajamar (pond), and wow, yeah, lots of water.

full pond, Uruguay

From our little country place — just a few hundred meters from Pilar’s, where the every-other-week feria organica happens, I could also see the river. That surprised me. I consider myself relatively observant, and if the river was visible from our place, I’d certainly never seen it before.

Much’ agua.

Since we first lived here at the mouth of the Río Solís Chico in Parque del Plata, and ever since loving its constantly changing paths as it hits the beach, I thought it might be worth checking out the water flow at the mouth of the river.

Solís Chico, Parque del Plata, Uruguay

Indeed! Hard to do justice in one photo, but in normal times the width of the water separating these two groups of people would be about one half this. You can get an idea here. In that video, all of the foreground beach was underwater today!

Much’ agua.

Flooded beach

Flooded beach, Atlántida, Uruguay

We had a lot of rain overnight and this morning.

Flooded beach, Atlántida, Uruguay

All the more water for Benji to splash around in. Here he takes a brief confused time out, attention divided between the head of cabbage he quickly lost interest in tearing apart, the stick I had been throwing for him drifting away, and something else. We were the only ones on the beach, so who knows what the something else might have been.