Trees all grown from seed.
John Butterworth puts together advice on how to grow your own Christmas Tree – and remember, it’s not just for this Christmas!
See also:
Five Unusual Fruit Trees to Grow
How to Grow Hops
Christmas Trees have got increasingly expensive, and it goes right against the grain to buy a ‘real’ tree that’s been cut off at the base, as it’s now a ‘dead’ tree before you even get it home. Though they can be treated as a crop like any other, home farmers who’ve spent the year growing their own vegetables might not countenance this sort of inefficiency. There are four ways of improving on it – make an artificial tree ; buy a rooted tree in a pot; grow a tree from saplings or seed (yes, really); or use the top of a tree that you intend to chop down for firewood anyway.
BUYING A ROOTED TREE AT CHRISTMAS
There are about ten types of tree commonly sold as ‘Christmas trees’ in Britain – the traditional tree is the Norway spruce (Picea abies).
Norway spruce.
It’s also almost always the cheapest, though it’s a bit prickly and does tend to lose its needles over the Christmas period. It’s lost out in popularity to the Nordman fir.
The Nordman fir is bushier and more upright than the Norway spruce, less prickly, and I think nicer looking, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course, so you pays your money and takes your choice, as ever.
Nordman fir.
The best bit about the firs is that they don’t drop their needles so easily when they’re indoors over Christmas.
The Korean fir (Abies koreana) is occasionally available at Christmas, and that’s my personal favourite, as it’s a lovely specimen tree when planted out, with fir cones like candlesticks, as you can see. These are brown because they’re ripe, but they are a lovely blue when they’re growing.
Korean fir.
How to tell them apart? It’s REALLY tricky telling firs apart, but easy to tell a fir from a spruce – the firs have little suckers on the base of the needles, whilst the spruces have their needles attached to the branches by little pegs – look at the picture to see what I mean. The fir is on the left, and the spruce is on the right.
Fir on left, spruce on right.
Buy fairly early, as there’s much more choice, and you can then control the conditions for the tree – never let the roots dry out, and keep it outside (in an outhouse if it’s frosty) until the very last minute. Christmas Eve is a nice compromise. When it’s inside, try to stand it somewhere cool if possible, and try to get it back outside again as soon as you can. It has to be on ‘Twelfth Night’ at our house, but from the tree’s perspective Boxing Day is about right, as the shorter its stay in a warm house, the more likely it is to survive being put outside in midwinter! Keep its roots moist while it’s indoors, and try to ease its eviction to the outside world by putting it in a cold outhouse if possible for a few days to get it acclimatised to the cold.
Assuming that the tree has survived the indignity of being roasted indoors and covered with decorations, you now have two options. Either leave it in the pot until next year, remembering to water it in dry spells, or plant it out if you have room to do so. That’s by far the best option as far as the tree is concerned, as you’ll find that it will grow far, far better – this Nordman fir has been left in its pot for two years;
Tree left in its pot all year.
Ccontrast it with the planted-out version in the earlier picture,but you may notice that the downside is that the planted tree is now a colossal great thing. A beautiful tree, granted, but unless you have a palatial house it’s not going to go indoors again, is it? If you plant it out (when it’s dormant but the ground is frost free – March is good), you’ll get maybe one or two extra years out of it before it’s too big to bring inside again.
GROWING FROM SAPLINGS
You do need plenty of ground for this option, as you really need at least six trees to be growing all the time, given that they need to be at least six years old before they’re big enough to use as a Christmas tree. Saplings can be bought from lots of nurseries, but be aware that many will only sell them by the hundred. Some will sell small quantities, albeit at a higher price per tree. Compare the price per sapling for small quantities to the £35+ for a grown tree around Christmas time though… Here’s what they look like at the nursery,
though these are larger than the 2–3-year-old saplings you’d get by mail order. If you do buy a batch of, say, ten, you should be able to sell a few trees each year and show a decent profit – very good for the home farmer.
As with all tree planting, it should be done in the dormant season when the ground is not frosty, which usually means November or March/April. Prepare the ground first, whilst the grass is still growing, with – overcome your scruples here – weedkiller. A 0.5m (20in) diameter weed-free circle will give your saplings a massive advantage. When your saplings arrive, keep the roots moist at all times! When ready to plant, dig slots in the centre of your sprayed circles with a sharp spade, breaking up the ground as you do it, then slide the roots carefully down the spade and withdraw it. Heel it in to make sure there are no air gaps round the roots.
They need to be planted about 1m apart, and sprayed round (very carefully) once a year with glyphosate for the first three years. You can also trim the foliage in the dormant season to keep a nice pyramid shape. From my experience, even these don’t grow very well in pots.
Potted Nordmans.
Compare these four in pots with this one from the same batch planted in pretty poor soil.
Planted Nordman fir.
GROWING FROM SEED
Easy-peasy, and probably the best way if you have a small garden. Just buy a packet of seed, and for a bit of a thrill buy mixed fir/spruce species (seeds sold as ‘bonsai’ are just ordinary trees, and readily available), sow as per the instructions on the packet, and within three or four years they’ll look like these lovely little trees.
Trees all grown from seed.
The smallest is the fir, probably a Nordman, and the others are spruces (Spruci? Spree?). They’ve been growing in an open cold frame, and were watered in the spring and summer but otherwise left alone. As they’ve always been in pots, I’m going to try potting them up (see how the roots are bursting out all over) to see if I can get nice, transportable trees without having to plant them, then dig them up. They should be big enough from about six years old onwards.
A HANDY COP-OUT
Once you are into this tree-planting cycle, some will get way too big to use as Christmas trees after a few years. If you haven’t got a small tree that passes muster any particular Christmas, you can always recycle a tatty specimen that you previously planted out by chopping the top off it for a Christmas tree and logging up the rest as firewood. We used a Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) that way last year, and there’s another with the black spot upon it for this year – they have to be thinned out anyway, so it’s a very satisfying solution – both a Christmas tree and several Yule logs in one.
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