Hit the Dirt; Living Christmas Trees

Hi this is Claire Ackroyd and you're listening to hit the dirt. I feel the need to talk about living Christmas trees because I get asked a lot and I know a lot of people who sell Christmas trees in containers is living Christmas trees and I have a sort of need to explain what I think of the problems of growing living trying to grow a living Christmas trees. You need to understand that. The trees that we use for Christmas trees around here obviously the native trees that will grow locally need a cold winter. To complete your cycle and in preparation for the winter they become dormant. They grow a they go into a sort of sleep period they hibernate they they grow a thick epidermis on the outside of their needles and they stop growing and they get ready to withstand the cold. And after a certain amount of cold when the world weather weather starts to warm up again then they start to grow and they lose dormancy they so they break dormancy and they start growing again in the spring. Now if you take a hardy dormant tree in the middle dead of winter the worst time of the year

possible when you bring it into a warm room it promptly loses dormancy and becomes less hardy. The condition that it then gets into is one that makes it think it's springtime and it doesn't need to watch out for winter anymore. And if you put that tree then back outside into January blizzards it will die. So. The short answer on what to do about this in Christmas trees is don't do them because they will kill them. However I don't want to rain on everybody's parade who would it's a nice idea to enjoy a tree for Christmas and then planted out in the garden enjoy it for the rest of your life as a member of your garden. If you're going to do that it can be done but you need to understand the plant's physiology and plan carefully to have your Christmas tree survive. So here's what you need to do you need to bring your tree into the house in stages. It wants to be parted with its roots in a good container so its roots are healthy and not stressed. And then you got a healthy little tree and you bring it into the house.

And I would bring it into your interim stayed put in the garage for a week and then bring it into the house have it in the house for as little time as possible. Don't do one of these sort of four week marathons as some people do with cut to Christmas trees. Keep the house where your Christmas tree is as cool as possible. Turn the temperatures down as night as low as you can or so you don't freeze the fish in the Canary. But let the tree be as cool as possible. And then when you have. Done with the tree and you want to take it back out again. This is where you have to slowly re acclimate it to the outdoors. You know you put it in the kitchen. If your kitchen is not like my kitchen it's almost like the outdoors. Then you take it out to the garage and then you take it to the porch and you slowly take it back out. You don't have to take it through fall again. And when you think there's a there's a lot of commonsense appends on the weather. It depends on the conditions that you've got but when you think that your tree is sort of really acclimated itself to the hard cold winter you can take it back outside again but you must

protect the roots. You cannot leave the root system above ground the freeze thaw that the root system above ground will experience is quite unlike the root system conditions below ground. The best thing to do is to pack the roots in hay. You can have a couple of bales of hay available in the garage and you can just pack the root system in a foot deep hay which is a very good insulator and you should be able to keep your tree alive if you do that. Now that's what you do if that's what you want to keep her for your Christmas tree alive. The other questions that I have is if you're going to go to all that trouble and take all that time. And headache to keep your tree alive. Why are you bothering to do that with an ordinary balsam fir which is what most Christmas trees are they make really lousy members of a garden community that not very long live trees they get scrawny as they get old. They're beautiful when they're sheared sprayed and used as Christmas trees. But I wouldn't go to all that effort for common little balsam fir. I apologize to the balsam fir gods for

insulting them but I don't think it's a very worthy tree in the garden. So I would be inclined if I was going to go to all that trouble to get something like a nice blue spruce or some interesting maybe a bristlecone pine or something that's going to be a really nice tree in the garden. When you've done all that Which then raises the other question is if you're going to buy some fancy tree for your garden why subjected to the miseries of being Christmas trees so the whole question is very vexed to me it raises eyebrows. I think I'm raising more questions and I'm giving you answers here but you need to keep all those things in mind when you try to do a living Christmas tree and the other thing I want to say is that using a cut Christmas tree is not such a bad thing to do it's a good rural industry in Maine growing Christmas trees and cutting them selling them to people for house trees is a good use of land in Maine. I would rather see that happening to the main land than some of the other uses to which it could be put. And so I think it shouldn't you shouldn't feel too bad if you do enjoy a Christmas tree. But I hope that whatever you you do end up when you do enjoy it. And this is being hit the

dirt and I'll put you again in a week.