This weekend marked the annual ritual: marching into the woods with a saw and coming back out with an unfortunate cedar tree.
Cedars aren’t your iconic Christmas trees, for good reason: They’re not nearly as conical or bushy as your average Fraser fir or blue spruce. But for us, they’re freely available, abundant and self-renewing. Our property’s loaded with them, and more are coming along all the time. So cedar it is. (Actually, this site lists the Eastern Red Cedar as the sixth most popular Christmas tree species, especially in the South! So we’re not crazy after all.)
We found a good one this time. It’s nice and round, relatively full, and has a jolly personality.
Who needs ornaments?
Nonetheless, after years of cedar Tannenbaums, I’m starting to yearn for something a bit more traditional. I hate the idea of driving somewhere to buy a tree. Number one, I’m cheap. Number two, the part of me that likes to grow my own tomatoes also wants to provide my own holiday stuffs. Therefore I tend to pick bouquets from the yard, make cards out of whatever’s floating around the attic and so forth.
So here’s my new scheme: We will start our own mini-Christmas tree farm. It’s just a matter of finding the right spot to plant, say, five or 10 little pine or spruce trees. In a few years, we could start to harvest. If we were really on the ball, I wonder if we could event dig up the trees by the roots, then replant after the holidays? Either way, we could certainly plant on a rotating schedule, thus ensuring a net tree loss of zero.
Anyone else grown your own Christmas tree?
