Category: Nature

General observations, generally during dog walks

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.

 

Half a lemon times two

Some people consult the Farmer’s Almanac and moon phases for best times to prune trees. I don’t.

For me, there are two “best times“ to prune a tree: 2) when I feel like it, and 1) when the wife tells me to do it, as she did today.

So, log-handled loppers in hand, directed by her, squinting into the sun, I lopped off the biggest branch first. As it fell, so did a lemon. But when I picked it up, I found half a lemon — seriously, almost exactly half a lemon, neatly sliced lengthwise.

Where was the other half? You guessed it: still attached to a branch overhead.

lemon cut in half by loppers

What are the chances of perfectly cutting in half a lemon you didn’t even see?

Well — maybe greater than one would expect with a tree that seems to be trying to communicate with us.