Congratulations, fig tree! You’re a year old.

After yesterday’s lengthy post crashed and I lost it the first time, I forgot to mention in the rewrite that our little fig tree has been a member of the Mortroski Mid-century Urban Farm for a full year now.

Whooohooo!

Last year at this time, it had about three leaves and really only two branches. It was about 1 foot tall. I was pretty proud of it though because I got it for free since my favorite garden center had a crazy loyalty program that gave you Canadian Tire-type money whenever you bought something during their promotional period.

You could only cash in that fake money at certain times. Because last year was the start of the MM Urban Farm, I bought a lot of stuff. Truckloads of dirt, compost, transplants, seeds, raised bed kits, organic fertilizer, worm castings, gloves. I very well may have been North Haven Gardens’ best customer in 2013.  And I held off purchasing that tree until I knew I could get it gratis.

With not much care, just a bit of organic fruit tree fertilizer in the spring and water when the sprinklers are run, the tiny fig tree has since doubled in height and is getting a nice set of leaves. Unfortunately, the birds ate all of the 12 tiny figs it produced back in the spring so no figs for us. That is why, if you have recently posted about your lovely fig trees and jam/preserve making or shown pictures of delicious fig salads, desserts and appetizers, I may have seemed a tiny bit, ok, VERY, jealous.

While I wasn’t planning on a bumper fig crop or anything like that, I was hoping for a small taste of the bounty to come.

Damn birds. Hope they enjoyed the figs, though that’s doubtful since they ate them before they were barely developed and definitely not sweet. They also ate all of the figs off the neighbor’s tree that I occasionally sampled from in the past in the name of research. (How else would I know what a Celeste fig tastes like? The varieties that grow in North Texas aren’t the same as the ones shipped to the yuppie-hippie grocery store. Those are mostly from California.)

Can’t wait to see what year 2 looks like for the little tree, especially since George is no longer interested in it.

Ok, little tree, let’s get growing and producing more figs, shall we?

Have a great day, everyone!