Picking almonds

 Today I picked almonds that had dried on the tree, that I planted a little more than a decade ago...

This is how almonds look like in their hulls... I used a large pebble to break them on a stone.

I am working on launching the website of Arbaro de Espero: https://arbarodeespero.wordpress.com/

This is how it looks like, but it is still unfinished!

I also discovered a beehive in the garden, a beehive that came to settle inside a hole in the trunk of a ficus elastica tree (I was speaking about these giant trees a few days ago). For four years I prayed to attract bees and a beehive. I did not feel like buying bees, because, it feels a bit like cheating, and it requires hard work and knowledge, and they may not make it because of ailments.

So I wished very dearly for bees to come and settle in the garden on their own will. And I tried a few innocent tricks to attract them, such as putting a bit of honey for them... but it did not work. Nowadays bees rarely build hives in a wild place.

And yet the unthikable happened, and yesterday, while showing the garden to my visitors, I looked at the ficus elastica tree from a different perspective. And I saw a lot of insects coming in and out the trunk, at around 4 meters height.

This morning I had the confirmation these insects are bees, and it is a real beehive, that chose to come settle in our garden. It shows how diverse the ecosystem we built is. We have tall trees that provide bees with flowers at all season of the year. 

I will be speaking more of our beehive in the next days, as I discover more of it. But I am really happy to have it.

And this is how the sunset looked from the rooftop of the barnhouse.