New Year of the Trees

Yesterday was the Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat – which is the birthday of trees. In the tradition, all fruit trees celebrate their birthday on this day. In honour of the trees’ birthday, we made a cake – peach and mango cobbler; yum! (Well, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it!)

Tu Bishvat is one of the best Jewish holidays, and not just because it’s traditional to eat fruit and nuts – it’s also one of the few holidays that doesn’t commemorate some past suffering and persecution.

So, as is traditional, we planted a tree.

It’s a great holiday, really. Imagine if everyone in the world celebrated by planting a tree every year. Imagine six and a half billion trees being planted each year.

The tree we planted is a Lilly Pilly, which is an Australian native fruit tree. It already had a few fruits on it when we got it – they’re small pink berries a bit like tiny rose apples, but Littletree already ate them all!

Purple did the hard work of digging a hole in the ground (actually, it was the spot where I had a little blueberry tree planted, but the @#$% brush turkeys dug it up and killed it).

Littletree put the little tree in the ground

and I pressed the soil in

 

We put some chicken wire around this tree, so hopefully the brush turkeys wont get this tree too (they also killed my Lemon Myrtle tree), otherwise we’ll be having roast wild turkey for dinner next week!

Happy New Year of the Trees!