Nursing our Fledgling Apple Orchard

The Jewish New Year for trees, or Tu Bishvat is coming up next week. In anticipation, I wrote the following piece for the Jewish parenting blog Kveller.com, which is also running a contest where you can win a package of our organic dates from our small business supporting Israeli farmers. Thanks for reading and Shabbat Shalom!

Years ago my husband and I volunteered on Kibbutz Sde Eliahu in Israel, working in an organic vineyard and vegetable garden. On Tu Bishvat (the Jewish holiday celebrating the new year for trees!) kibbutzniks we had never seen in the fields came to help in the garden for a few hours. When we left the kibbutz, the leader of the vineyard gave us a little farewell blessing. We didn’t understand it all but he definitely said to “have children” and “plant trees with real roots, not just tomatoes.”

So, we returned home and pretty much got to work following his instructions.

Six years later, we are grateful to have two small children and a tiny heirloom apple orchard. The orchard is still very young and vulnerable. The trees are spindly and they had a tough time during last year’s flood. A few of them are no taller than our 4-year old boy and have branches as thin as pencils. I am always happy to see a bird rest on one of these little branches, treating the sapling like a real tree for a moment.

Here in Maryland it is still winter and far too early to plant trees on Tu Bishvat. So we are developing our own little Tu Bishvat tradition. This year, we plan to take our children down to our fledgling heirloom apple orchard to visit the trees and give them some much needed attention. We will bring a nice pile of mulch to each tree, check them for winter damage and possibly add a few bamboo support poles if needed. We will talk to the children (and probably the trees too) about our hopes for a day when the trees are full of fruit and strong enough to climb. We will imagine Tu Bishvat in Israel, where almond trees are blooming. And by then we’ll probably need to go inside to warm up.

This article originally appeared here on kveller.com. Kveller.com offers a Jewish twist on parenting, everything a Jewish family could need for raising Jewish children–including crafts, recipes, activities, Hebrew and Jewish names for babies…and advice from Mayim Bialik.

tomato time

We try to eat at least somewhat seasonally in our house, switching from fresh vegetables to frozen in the winter and following the fruit that is coming from Florida rather than  further afield.  Most of the year I skip over my fresh produce section in the store because there is minimal organic and we either have fresh vegetables from the farm or are working through our frozen stash.

Of course, I make exceptions but it always feels particularly strange and a little like a betrayal to buy tomatoes from someone else’s farm, especially from an anonymous supermarket source . Plus, if I do break down and buy a tomato  in the winter they are usually pretty awful (like they have been in cold storage). So for the most part, we do not eat fresh tomatoes except during tomato season.

So, when the first tomatoes start to come in from our farm it is cause for a mini-celebration. This is our first tomato week, a little later than usual but they are full size (cherry tomatoes usually come first but they were planted later this year.)   This year, we celebrated with fancy Capri salads with fresh mozzarella which seems increasingly available.  The children are eating them sliced on plates with a little sea salt and enjoying the messy fingers.  And my husband and I are eating them whole like apples. 

If all goes well (tss, tss) and we avoid  pitfalls like early blight, late blight, blossom end rot and those horrible new invasive stink bugs, we could be picking tomatoes past Labor Day and even at a trickle until the first frost.   We have had some tough tomato diseases blow through in the past few years, so we need luck, prayers, crossed fingers, precautions, enough (but not too much) rain and whatever else works.   So while the tomatoes are coming in, we  will try to be sure to enjoy them a little more knowing that we will miss them in the winter.

This post originally appeared on kveller.com.

Kveller.com offers a Jewish twist on parenting, everything a Jewish family could need for raising Jewish children–including crafts, recipes, activities, Hebrew and Jewish names for babies…and advice from Mayim Bialik.