New views from Paradise  

As I spend time in my little paradise, spring unfolds in all its beauty, and I keep discovering the little gems of nature. Here is a flowering apple tree. The branch shown here is broken, and hangs just by a couple fibers, but still it's full of life!

The grass is flowering...

And the strawberries are flowering too. They are endemic here and grow wild in large numbers.

More flowers, this time not of anything edible. 

And here you have a notro in the forground, a cherry in the back, and yellow flowering trees in between.

The Notro tree puts its touch of color at any place it can grow in full open sun. 

But red is not a registered trademark of the Notro tree. A humble fungus displays it too.

Speaking of fungus, my little paradise grows large quantities of Digüeñes, a kind of edible fungus that grows on Nothofagus trees. It has the consistency of a soft rubber eraser, and the intense taste of doubly destilled rainwater! Still, or perhaps because of that, it's considered a delicacy by many people. Preparing Digüeñes is the art of adding the proper spices.  

And is this one edible? Can anyone tell me? It looks appetizing enough!

Who invented the corkscrew? Nature, of course!

A spider was at work in the night, making a web, and then mist came in. The web collected lots of droplets.

Some animals are hard to see, but we can notice their presence from the tracks they leave. This is the home of the woodpeckers.

And this was the home of a rabbit. There seems to have been some problem with engineering.

Some overactive rats found this helmet and exercised their teeth on it.

And this couple apparently died in action! What a way to die, I must say...

But this one is very much alive, climbing over my hand.

The weather has been getting better, with most days being fully sunny. But sometimes clouds come in and add decoration to the sky.

The same clouds sometimes create beautiful sunsets.


Summer is advancing, and with this the landscape changes. The cows have been thrown out of my paradise, for the sin of eating it up at a much to high rate. As a result, the grass now can grow, and even flower! 

In the forest, the there are also flowers.

There is a little, beautiful, fern-like grass everywhere. Later I found out that the seeds of this grass are ones that form little balls full of hooks, and cling to clothing with a vengeance! Let's enjoy the sight while this plant is still green and harmless!

This plant is known for its poisonous juice. It's a relative of the tobacco.

Let me introduce you to my tobacco garden!

Finally, the cherries are ripe, and the birds didn't get all of them! These cherries are quite small, but they make up for it by having very big seeds! :-)

As summer advances, butterflies appear. Nobody in the wider neighborhood uses any pesticides, so the insects can thrive.

Moths are also plentiful. Some are really large!

But the most plentiful of all insects here are the grasshoppers. Here you can see some, very busy making even more grasshoppers!

With so many insects around, little mice start showing up. This one was so trustful that I could shoot many photos from close up, and even make a video! Unfortunately I don't have the bandwidth the upload the video. This little mouse is so cute!

No ecosystem of this sort would be complete without snakes. Here is one. It was also very kind with me, the photographer, and posed until I got tired of shooting photos!

Now that we are already at floor level, why not look a little further? Oh, there are the strawberries! And lots of them! 

A moment's harvest, welcome refreshment during a little stroll around paradise.

The strawberries ripen during several months. Not so the blackberries. They ripen in late february and early march, but do so in an abundance that defies all imagination!

Roughly at the same time, the blue plums start dropping off the trees. These are ripe, and ready to drop off when the tree is shaken a bit.

There is no need to go and buy fruit! It's a simple matter of shaking trees and picking up what falls down, or harvesting from the ubiquitous blackberry bushes.

The next due are the yellow plums! They look like they will be ready next week!

And indeed, a week later I collected the first basketful of them, and made jam.

Also the apples are ripening. There are apple trees scattered all over the land, I keep finding new ones almost every week! And each tree gives a different sort of apples. Here are a few samples:

I can't get enough of this... Here is another closeup of the results of a stroll through my fruit garden!

On one of those strolls, I found a Roble tree humming with activity. The tree had a small wound and was loosing sap through it. Yellow Jacket wasps and these big antlered insects, how do you call them, were amiably sharing the place and feeding on the sap. 

The world of insects never stops giving surprises. Like this moth. I think I have seen such a shape, implemented in aluminium and Plexiglass! Who copied from whom? Did nature copy from Lockheed, or was it the other way around?

Here is a detail of this moth's antennae! Reminds me of a log periodic antenna!

After a while, the moth grew wary of my photo taking, and flashed this impressive and dangeorus looking cat's face at me! I was duly impressed and left her in peace.

Not so peaceful was this Yellow Jacket, dining on a grasshopper knuckle!

But at large, my paradise is peaceful. Just look at the landscape in the morning mist, a view I get often out of my front door when the sun is just coming up!

Or see this cloud front over forest land. This is the view I will have from my definitivie house's living room windows.

 


Back to Implementing my paradise.