Now that the Christmas season is here, you may already have your Christmas tree up and fully decorated inside your home. If not, you and your family may want to consider putting up a real Christmas tree this year.
“It’s a great family experience, but there’s also some really significant environmental benefits to using real Christmas trees as your Christmas tree decoration,” says Lenny Farlee, Extension Forester with Purdue University’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. He was a guest on the latest episode of the “Your Farm” Podcast presented by Purdue Extension.
“One of the best things you can do is to buy your tree locally,” he says. “Whether you want to go to a choose-and-cut operation and have that family experience of cutting down your own tree, or whether you want to buy a pre-cut tree one of your local Christmas tree farms, I think it’s important that you’re supporting those local farms to keep those folks in business doing this sustainable activity.”
He says many of your local Christmas tree farms also provide a great deal of environmental and sustainability benefits year-round.
“One of the great stories of live Christmas trees is for every single tree cut, typically, there’s one-to-three trees planted,” according to Farlee. “Only about 20-to-30 percent of the Christmas trees on a farm might be cut every year—sometimes less. So, there’s this constant cover of trees on this site that’s great for soil conservation, it’s providing some wildlife habitat, and it provides a really beautiful landscape for many folks to see with those conifers year-round.”
Farlee adds that recycling that live Christmas tree after the holidays provides additional benefits.
“One benefit is to cut the log of the tree and save those logs for a Yule Log or firewood next Christmas,” he says. “The other thing folks can do is keep their Christmas tree intact and use it as a bird feeder. You can actually take your Christmas tree outside, lean it against the fence or place it on the ground, and you can take pine cones and stuff them with peanut butter, which makes for a great bird feeder. It also provides cover for the birds as well in terms of birds being able to run in and out of branches in the greenery.”
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