And now, today, behold — leaves!
Well, the jury is still out on whether I properly pruned (or destroyed), the two fig trees in my yard.
But while I’ll be very sorry if I killed them, particularly the one my uncle gave me not long before his passing, some small comfort is on its way — thanks to our friend Scout.
OK, you can probably see the leaf structure better here…
You’ll recall I ran into Scout at the recent demonstration. I mentioned to her the recent pruning incident and my concerns about it, and she said she would be glad to let me have some cuttings from the trees in her yard. Which was welcome news, because I’d seen those trees in the summertime, and they were just exploding with figs.
Whereas my trees produce barely a dozen figs each per year. You can’t feast on them, or make fig preserves, which I love. (Although in their defense, they do provide a nice, moderate snack now and then.)
So I went over last weekend, and Scout and her husband not only let me take some cuttings, but gave me a container of root accelerant they had in their garage.
I only took four, but I researched rather carefully how to turn cuttings into trees, and amazingly, I think maybe I did it right (with my wife’s careful guidance).
Take a look at this grove, this plantation, this forest of growth I’ve got going on. I put four sticks, with a slight greenness at the tips, into the soil, on Ash Wednesday. See below. The image at the top is a mere four days later, and you can see identifiable leaves coming out at the top.
At this rate, before long, I’ll have enough fig leaves to open a clothing boutique in the Garden of Eden. Can fig preserves be far behind?
Ash Wednesday: Mere sticks, with the slightest bulge of green at their ends…
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Meanwhile, below, you can see that another contestant is trying hard to catch up…
I regret that my iPhone 15 has trouble focusing perfectly on things that small. It’s so great for everything else — the best camera I’ve had since my Nikon 8008… which, alas, sits in a drawer now because it requires film.
And film is not the most convenient thing when you want to shoot something and post it TODAY.
Actually, I was just barely able to do that right at the point of change from one type of camera to another. In New York during the 2004 GOP Convention, I used my wife’s viewfinder camera (I wasn’t going to travel with my good SLR) and shot a roll or two each day, and had then processed at a drug store, picked up the developed roll, with CD included, an hour later, and was able to email photos back to Columbia for the next day’s paper.
But that’s not what I’d call “convenient,” although it was more so than it would have been here, since there was a Duane Reade on every corner, more or less, in Manhattan.
But today it wouldn’t work at all. I don’t trust such places with film, on the rare occasions when I use it. Now, I send it off to a professional developing house, because the quality of local services at CVS, etc., has declined to practically rock-bottom. And I only send film to those places once every couple of years. It’s expensive, takes too long, and the quality just doesn’t match most HD digital images…
Meanwhile, below, you can see that another contestant is trying hard to catch up…