Hope eternal

Hope is perhaps the most wonderful manifestation of our survival instinct. When all else fails, there’s always hope to keep us going and when hope dies, well, we die. Hope is also a big if often overlooked element of the country lifestyle. The amount of time we spend hoping every year massively outweighs the amount of actual physical labour we put into tending our garden.

We hope the seeds would sprout. We hope it rains when we need it to rain and that it doesn’t rain when the soil is moist enough. We hope the lice would leave our flowers alone for once (they won’t, but we hope). We hope the our new saplings will take, all of them. At least most of them. Below is a picture of hope. Its name is Golden Delicious.

Here’s another. Its name’s Bing. Cherry Bing. Like most of the other trees we bought in early December, the tops of the branches are cut off. On the advice of our much more experienced neighbour, we also cut off the tops of the rest as well. The point: make them start branching out early on.

What we didn’t do was cut as low as he advised, leaving a maximum of 90 cm from the bottom. The point of that is to keep the tree small and manageable when harvest time comes. However, since we’re aiming not only for harvest but for shade, we don’t mind the trees getting a bit taller than what’s considered optimal here.

And this here is an unexpected Christmas present from the neighbour that we found propped up on the gate that separates our respective gardens. It’s a hazelnut sapling that the neighbour accidentally took out while trimming his tree and being the wonderful neighbour that he is, decided to share.

This, finally, is a promise. It’s the promise of shade for future crops, also known as a birch. It’s tiny. It came in a pot along with its sister. But it’s going to grow big and even more beautiful. It’s quite humbling, how trees grow.

All in all, we bought eleven saplings last year, featuring, besides the four cherries, four apples, and two birches, a chestnut. It’s surprisingly small but if it survives, it should grow into a magnificent, large-leaved shade bringer that we desperately need. Here’s to hope and may it always keep springing eternal.