Father-son eco-friendly Tiny Tree project back this holiday season

The Tiny Tree project is back again this year, where anyone can adopt a small tree for the holidays. The idea of this eco-friendly project is to avoid unnecessary waste by having to cut down a full-grown tree and throwing it away after the holidays, instead giving people the option to re-adopt their Tiny Tree year after year to watch it grow.

Or, one can even choose to keep the Tiny Tree and plant it in their yard.

This project was brought to life by none other than 11-year-old Étienne Ethier, who shared the idea with his father Martin when he was only three years old.

Étienne has been involved since the beginning,” said his father Martin Ethier. “We’ve been starting with friends and after we went with retailers in Montreal, then Quebec, other cities in the Province of Quebec.”

Currently, the Tiny Trees can be adopted in multiple locations in Montreal, Rive-Nord, Trois-Rivières and in Huntington.

Since 2018, Martin and his 11-year-old son Etienne have been working hard to bring Tiny Trees back to their customers. This year they’re expanding to new locations with merchants like Sylvia at Marché Fermier Masson who is taking part in the project for the first time. 

She and Martin met at her farm in Île-Bizard this year where they began discussing his son’s project, Tiny Trees.

We wanted to put something outside in the store that’s not going to freeze, that’s going to be happy outside, so I talked to Martin and we were able to figure out something, so I got some trees,” said Sylvia Meriles, describing why she decided to participate in the project this year.

Sylvia just received a fresh batch of trees and will partake in the tree adoption process so she can offer her clients their trees back next year.

“Next winter they can come here or another drop off place and take the same tree. Martin, he put a small tag, so you can also name the tree – put a name, I don’t know, Frank or Joe, to the tree – and he’s going to be able to tag the tree and give you the same tree next winter,” she added.

Etienne, who first had the idea for this project when he was only three years old, has even thought of a solution for clients whose trees have grown too large for re-adoption.

He and his father have reserved a plot on their land where the not-so-tiny trees can be planted in the ground at their forever home. They even give GPS coordinates to clients so they can check on the growth status of their tree in real time.

The father-son duo truly are a great team — every year they keep building on each other’s ideas. Martin says he has a new one for next year.

“This is one we tried as a Bonsai – there’s a bunch of others,” said Martin as he holds up a small and crooked tree.

“Sometimes the young children are attracted to the really small or ugly trees so we said instead of just planting them and let them grow naturally, we are thinking next year to add a couple to every distribution.”