Preparing For Shemittah: Battle of the Bougainvillea

Since Shemittah comes every seven years, we all knew well in advance that Shemittah was coming, and everyone living in Israel knew that we had to prepare our gardens for Shemittah. Mainly, this means cutting all our trees and plants right back, because you're not allowed to prune them during the Shemittah year unless they might die without pruning (it turns out that having your gate blocked by your rose bush is not a good enough reason to prune your roses during Shemittah).

But, even though we all knew that Shemittah was coming, we all still ended up doing it at the last minute. Every gardener in my neighbourhood was booked solid for the two weeks before Rosh Hashanah. It was a good thing that my neighbour has a good relationship with her gardener, so that a week before the end of Elul, she was able to get him to chop off some ivy that had taken over a shared wall and was turning into a home for hornets. My husband spent a busy day cutting back our lemon trees and clementine tree, and I had a tough fight cutting the roses down to size. Even on erev Rosh Hashanah, there was still a flurry of last-minute pruning and tidying going on. 

Our biggest problem was our bougainvillea. When we moved into our house a year ago, it came with a massive, monster bougainvillea which blocked the sunlight and was threatening to bar all entrance to our garden. A bougainvillea is a hardy, tough plant with beautiful deep pink flowers, but killer 3-inch-long thorns. Shortly after we moved in, we got someone to remove it. It took four men almost four hours to cut it down and drag it down the steps outside our building. I felt like I had witnessed the death of King Kong. 

Well, we brushed off our hands, enjoyed the new experience of seeing the sunlight finally penetrating our garden, and thought that that was the end of it. Oh, how wrong we were. It turns out that bougainvillea is almost impossible to kill. The poisoned stump continued to send up new green shoots every week. After a couple of months, my husband realised that the green shoots coming up on the other side of the garden were actually young bougainvillea suckers, sent out by the old, poisoned, officially-declared-dead, stump. It was the beginning of a war of attrition between us and the bougainvillea. Every time we thought it was eradicated, it sprang up in a different part of the garden. 

Well, it was only a few days before Rosh Hashanah that we realised that if we just resign from our private bougainvillea war for a year, then by the end of Shemittah we won't even be able to get out of the front door. My husband worked so hard to dig up and destroy every bougainvillea sucker, and poisoned the stump yet again. But despite our efforts, it was not even Yom Kippur before we spotted the first new baby bougainvilleas popping up underneath our trampoline. Cue the first of many, as it turns out, sudden Shemittah questions that we asked our Rabbi. (Thankfully, he told us that yes, we were allowed to destroy the bougainvillea during the Shemittah year, if it would be causing us significant damage to leave it for twelve months.)

The need to prepare for Shemittah has had other interesting results. Normally, the trees and bushes that line our streets get trimmed just after Succos, but this year they got their yearly haircut early - before Rosh Hashanah. It all became so normal that when a friend in the UK told me that she'd mowed the lawn that day, I said yes of course, for Shemittah, before remembering that that didn't actually apply to her!

More odd questions came up after Shemittah began ...

*Any halachic rulings or opinions mentioned in this blog are only my own understanding of the halachos of Shemittah, or else are specific rulings given by our Rabbi for our particular case and should not be extrapolated for use as general rulings. Please refer to your own competent halachic authority or a reliable and reputable Shemittah book.