An inquisitive old fart with a camera
The squall-like wind did not last long the other day, but it came from every direction, which is why I so thoroughly sealed the stairway windows.
In Atlántida, a rather majestic tree was uprooted, taking part of the sidewalk with it. I don’t think winching it back into place is an option. Too bad.
A few meters away, the roots of another tree that fell the same direction, but was cut up to clear the street.
On a less-traveled street, a red rag warns passersby of a downed cable.
Atlántida can be a (relatively) noisy place — sometimes I refer to it as “Alarmtida.” In addition to regular and specious security “threats“ duly announced by neighbors’ alarm systems, we have weed-eaters, gas leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and chainsaws. The chainsaws have been mosquito-annoying persistent for a couple days. My wife had a revelation today, when all of a sudden her upstairs office lit up for the first time in the winter afternoon sun.
Turns out the neighbors spooked (perhaps) with the latest windstorm, and decided to remove a eucalyptus tree or two towering 40 meters or so to our northwest, where it/they blocked a significant amount of our afternoon sun (when you live in the south, the sun’s in the north).
A little hard to convey in pictures, especially when your point is, “Hey, the sun’s not blocked there anymore!”
Most of the way up the tree in the middle, a guy with a chainsaw negotiated next moves and lowering of cut branches with the crew on the ground.
Seriously, there’s a guy in there somewhere with a freaking chain saw — about where the rope comes up from the lower left. At this point, half the tree horizontally has gone, and probably the top quarter of what remains. The neighbors will have a few years of firewood out of this. Good on ‘em (and thanks)!
The arbor vitae in the foreground doesn’t show from this sunset photo in June 2014.
And because it’s close, looks equivalent in this photo I took tonight. It’s not (notice the twin stumps of the removed tree, just left of it). This represents a huge, and wonderful, increase of light into our back yard. Sun glaring in the kitchen window — a new winter afternoon treat!
The microclimate of our back yard has just changed, for the better in terms of gardening, perhaps more challenging in terms of mitigating summer heat.
Always interesting to observe changes, no?
I took this on Thursday morning. It went away quickly. Not as heavy frost as four years ago. I was thinking it too early in the year to have frost, so interesting to revisit that.
This afternoon, walking a slightly different route than normal, I spotted a pine tree starting over — lots of trees were lost to fire several years ago. You have to wonder how much of the existing root system feeds this. Or did it sprout from seed in the rotting trunk? I’ll have to look more closely.
Well, OK, I honestly don’t really know if it’s mushroom “season.“ But as autumn progresses, they seem to be popping up everywhere. I spotted this cluster on a eucalyptus tree recently.
Are they edible? I have no idea. They don’t look like the ones people sell on the side of the road. The last time we bought some of those — six years ago — we ended up throwing them out because they were so nasty. Not poisonous. Just not good. Perhaps they were the pine tree mushrooms instead of the eucalyptus tree mushrooms.
Another nice development since we moved here (recall coconut oil going from nonexistent to ubiquitous) is almost-constant availability of fresh mushrooms in the supermarkets. They’re not always at a price we want to pay, but they’re available.
No, Uruguay is not tropical and mangoes don’t really grow here. Unless they do. We’ll see.
My wife woke up this morning after a dream that one of our avocado trees was starting to produce! She walked outside and voila! Seems like we just checked the other day and saw nothing.
I’m guessing these two trees are around seven years old.
Landmark day 😉
Our two avocado trees are growing beautifully. Unfortunately, after six+ years they show no interest in producing fruit. A few months ago I chopped the tops off them to see if that would help.
Good news, though: we have generous friends 😉
Just the thing to accompany a Sunday omelet and homemade bread.
This was our “test” pond two years ago. We didn’t know if it would fill with water or not.
Indeed, it did. So this year we enlarged it. And no rain came. And it went to almost bone dry a few weeks ago. Fortunately, we had never put any fish in it.
To get a feel for the difference in size, note that the earlier version ends on the left partly past the front of the neighbor’s ugly barn.
Now to go near Tienda Inglesa, trim some willow branches, and try again to get trees started.
Anacahuita trees, at least in my mind, are smallish, wispy shade trees. At least they were until I saw this one. Wow!