Good Growing

Ken Johnson: 00:04

Welcome to the good growing podcast. I am Ken Johnson, horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension coming to you today from Jacksonville, Illinois with a gardenbite. And now that we're past Thanksgiving, many of us are going to be going out and picking out a Christmas tree. So for this week's garden bite, we're gonna take a look back at a podcast we did in 2020 with Robert Richardson, who is the president of the Illinois Christmas Tree Association, And he's gonna talk about the process of growing Christmas trees from when they put it in the ground until you come out and cut it down or pick one up from a tree lot yourself. So enjoy.

Chris Enroth: 00:41

Can you take me through, like, the process of growing a Christmas tree? You know, you so you plant a cutting or, like, a rooted cutting. And from from there until harvest, does that I mean, that sounds like decade like, a decade at least.

Robert Richardson: 00:58

Well, it's the pines grow faster than the firs and spruces do, but we plant seedlings. We don't start them from seed, although there's a few places that do. But for the most part, there are nurseries that will go out into the forest and collect pine cones off of nice trees and bring them back to the greenhouse, start them from seed there, and then different seeding beds. And after three or four years, they're gonna sell them to guys like me. And they're gonna be, you 12 to 18 inches tall.

Robert Richardson: 01:32

And, generally, they come bare root, which there's no dirt on the roots. And so we plant them fairly soon after we get them. And that's usually around, for me, it's around, sometime in April, April, even towards the April, where the ground is dried out enough after after winter so that we can work it up and get ready to plant our our little tree our seedlings from. Many farmers, when you cut down a Christmas tree the next year, he can put a little seedling next to that old stump. And and that's fine, especially if he doesn't have much land to work with.

Robert Richardson: 02:10

But now that seedling has to compete with the bigger trees around it. And then when you're looking at the big trees, you're not gonna watch where you're going, and you'll step on some of them and break them and stuff. But, so many farms do that, but we have the luxury of having enough space that we tend to plant in blocks. And so, an entire block or at least a half a block will be the same variety, same age of of tree. And so we use a tree planter, and it's it's a simple machine.

Robert Richardson: 02:40

It makes a slice in the ground. It's just a few inches wide and in about a oh, eight, ten inches deep. And then, every five or six feet, the little bell goes off. We stick the roots of our ceiling down into that slot. And as the machine moves forward, there's a big wheel on the back that'll push the dirt close and kinda get our ceiling planted.

Robert Richardson: 03:03

So we have to prepare the ground first, of course. And instead of working in the sod sod's a little bit hard to replant into. You can you can use a shovel or a spade or something and plant it if you're just doing a few seedlings. But it's a lot of work and it's time consuming. So we work up the ground so that it's bare ground.

Robert Richardson: 03:27

And I guess I should go back a little bit further in that if it's a piece of ground that's had trees previously, there's gonna be some stumps out there. So we have to cut off the stumps so that you don't trip on them and and we don't hit them with machinery. But we'll dig up the stumps or or grind out the stumps actually, and then work up that ground with a a big disc and a rototiller so we have a fine seed bed. And then our tree planner will come through and we'll plant those seedlings. And just after we plant them, we go by one more time by on foot to make sure that they're standing up straight.

Robert Richardson: 04:05

Then we take the heel of our boot and pack the dirt around that seedling so it has good soil contact with the roots. You know, roots can't grow through the air, they have to have contact with the soil and pick up moisture and nutrients. So that's then once we have them planted, now we have to start to take care of those trees. And I'm talking personal experience, and I think most other farms are kinda doing the same basic process. But we have the thing we fight more than anything are the weeds.

Robert Richardson: 04:39

Weeds grow faster than our seedlings do and they would shade it from a lot of the sunlight and takes on the moisture and nutrients away. So we try to keep the weeds suppressed throughout most of the growing season after we plant our our seedlings. We have too many that we can just use a hoe to hoe around the things. And so we use the same farm chemicals that we put on corn and soybeans. They don't hurt the trees either.

Robert Richardson: 05:05

And we'll spray on either side of our our row of seedlings, That'll keep the weeds down. Now as you know, chemicals don't last a really long time. They decompose fairly quickly. And so we'll have to spray a couple of times, maybe even three times throughout the growing season to keep the weeds down. We don't wanna spray chemicals over the whole field and have bare ground every place because then we have soil and water erosion.

Robert Richardson: 05:32

And so we keep the strip of grass in between those rows, kinda hold everything in place. And we'll come back the next year. So, you know, the tree is just kinda getting established the first year or two, getting its roots down in there. We can come by the next year and make sure that it's growing properly. I I tell all the school school kids that they're all familiar with that little sprig at the top where you put the angel or the star.

Robert Richardson: 06:02

That's called the leader. And Christmas tree, just like any group or organization or school, needs a leader to show it which way to grow. Once in a while, the leader gets damaged. And so eventually, one of the lateral branches would kind of volunteer and turn upwards to become a leader. But we may speed that up a little bit, take a bamboo stick and tie it to our tree, bend up a lateral branch and train it to become a leader.

Robert Richardson: 06:27

So we're looking for one leader up through the middle of that tree. Once in a while, we have a tree with too many leaders and that's just as bad, but it's easier to fix and take a hand pruner and clip out those extra leaders. After a few years, well, then we'll start to trim them a little bit more. When we plant the seedlings, oftentimes there's some branches that are at or near ground level. And as that tree grows, those branches will not grow up with the tree.

Robert Richardson: 07:02

They're gonna grow out and they'll get bigger, but they're gonna be attached right at near the ground level where they are. And a lot of farms will leave those on, especially if they're wholesale farms. But after a few years, I'm gonna come along and take a hand pruner and clip off those bottom branches so they'll have a space between the bottom branch and the ground. This lets the air circulate underneath there a little bit better. So I have less residue building underneath, keep it dry a little bit better.

Robert Richardson: 07:29

When I spray my chemicals, I spray from the side so I can kinda tuck them underneath the tree a little bit better that way. And but most important, when it comes time for our customers to go out and cut down that tree, there's, excuse me, there's enough of a stump left over that you can still cut down your tree and have a stump to put into your tree stand. Mhmm. So there's no machine that'll do that for me. We just use the hand pruners.

Robert Richardson: 07:58

A couple hours a day is about all I can stand to bend over, but we try to do it a little bit every day, throughout the summertime to trim those bottom branches.

Chris Enroth: 08:07

Yeah. The good old fashioned hand pruners.

Robert Richardson: 08:09

I There's nothing gotta have a

Chris Enroth: 08:11

good pruner. All the time. Yes. I so I've seen videos of ninjas in Christmas tree yards with, like, samurai katanas, and they're just hacking away, trimming this is that you?

Robert Richardson: 08:26

I don't have a ninja outfit, but after four or five years or more, then we're gonna start to trim the trees because they don't all grow into a natural Christmas tree shape. Some are kinda round and bushy and none of the nobody wants a Christmas bush. They all want Christmas tree. And so we have to trim them up a little bit and some take more trimming than others. Blue spruce tends to be naturally trimmed and so that's why it's a good lawn tree that you don't really need to trim that at all.

Robert Richardson: 08:56

But many of the other varieties, we do have to trim them up in order to maintain their shape. And actually, as a Christmas tree grower, I'm actually gonna slow those trees down a little bit so they don't grow too fast. On on some of the varieties, white pine in particular, that leader could be three or even four feet tall. So that's how much space there would be between the branches, and so they get stretched out too much. So we kinda slow them down a little bit, basically, to fourteen, fifteen, 16 inches a year so that they'll they'll be filled out.

Robert Richardson: 09:31

So, yes, during the summer, after the new growth has come out for that season, we can clip off the tips of those branches and where we cut them off, that's where it will set buds for the next year. And so, yes, we use a it's a not a machete, but it's a lightweight shearing knife. Mhmm. And and they get trimmed around so that they maintain their shape and they kinda dense them up a little bit and keep them from going too far. And at that same time, we'll also be checking the leaders to make sure there's still only one leader.

Robert Richardson: 10:05

So that's what we're looking for. And we don't wanna do it too soon because then the trees get too dense. But after four or five years, we start to trim them up a little bit more until they're ready for harvest. Every tree has to be trimmed every year until you take it home for Christmas or, you know, there's always a few of them that are too ugly no matter what we do. And depending on the type, we may be able to take that into the barn and cut it up into pieces, and that's what we make the decorations out of the wreaths and garland and stuff.

Robert Richardson: 10:37

We can't do it with all of them, but on on some of the varieties, we can do that to some extent, kinda recycle those those ugly trees if we can. We don't have enough of those, which is a good thing. So we do go out and we buy boughs from Northern Wisconsin or in Michigan, that they've taken off of mature trees in the oftentimes in the national forests. They'll get a permit to take boughs off. And so we buy bundles of boughs to bring in for our reef makers and and our garland maker.

Robert Richardson: 11:13

So we try to use every bit as we can, but we can't do it on all of the trees, just some of them. And that's pretty much it. It's gonna take to grow a fir tree, it will take basically seven to eight years, maybe nine. It'll be about ten or twelve years before we get an entire block cleared off and we can replant that block again. So the last the last year or two, there's always a few trees left over and there's usually a reason why they're still there.

Robert Richardson: 11:44

They're just not growing very well. And so we'll have to throw away a few of them. But for the most part, we'll clear off a block, and then we can replant that area. But it's gonna take a little while. So we have to plan kind of, you know, ten eight, nine, ten, eleven years in the future of what we think we can sell.

Robert Richardson: 12:08

And that's always been a surprise because you don't know when we're gonna peak. You know? How many trees can I sell? Well, it seems to keep on growing. I don't know.

Robert Richardson: 12:17

It's it gets to be more and more all the time, which is why it's it's a nice business to have because I think the demand for a live tree is there if I can grow them fast enough to to fill that demand.

Ken Johnson: 12:34

Well, that was a lot of great information on everything that goes into growing Christmas trees. The good growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Ken Johnson. A special thank you to all of our listeners and our viewers on YouTube. And as always, keep on growing.