Treat your family to a perfect tree

Choosing the perfect Christmas tree may seem like fun, but for many of us it’s a time consuming, arduous process.

There are several ways to treat yourself to this pleasure. The most obvious is to purchase one of the many trees available in the box stores or nurseries. If you like to get your exercise you can apply to the Mat-Su Borough for a cutting permit, get a list of approved cutting areas and off you go. Or, you may wish to buy a growing tree in a pot.

I’m not sure where or when the practice of selling potted trees began, but rest assured it was not in Alaska. We get a few calls a year from people looking for live, potted trees. The concerns are valid — not wanting to kill a standing tree, not wanting to buy a tree imported from the lower states and wanting to plant the tree outside in the spring. Bringing a potted tree into the house this time of year would be a death sentence for the little bugger, suddenly zapped out of dormancy, brought into a warm environment only to be dumped back into the cold a couple of weeks later. At this point it’s insta-freeze and the poor fellow is long gone by spring. Trees just don’t like this kind of treatment.

So, for all the good intentions you have just become the worst kind of killer — the one that gives hope before the noose. A potted tree would work well if you put it on the patio — outdoors — and enjoyed it from afar, or if you lived in a much more temperate environment where the shock factor were minimized. It’s just not the best idea for here.

It is noteworthy to mention that farming Christmas trees is a sound agricultural business and that all those trees being offered to us, mostly from the large box stores, are grown and harvested just like the broccoli we eat for lunch. Granted, the growing season is a bit longer, but nonetheless it’s a harvested, used, re-grown commodity. It is also comforting to know they can be recycled into mulch products at the end of the holidays.

To get the most out of shipped in trees, consider the following. Most of them are harvested many weeks before we see them, typically the Christmas tree harvest begins in the early October. They are kept stacked in the field and eventually hauled to their final destinations. They are only refrigerated while in transport to keep them from too much cold or heat. Once they arrive, they are sold to us and we take them home thinking they are non-frozen and fresh. Not so fresh, I’m afraid, and perhaps frozen as well, if they’ve been sitting outside or you drive home 20 miles with the lovely creature thrown in the back of your truck. To prolong their beauty try re-cutting the tree as you put it in water and throw a little baking soda in the water. It acts a bit like a preservative and does wonders for prolonging your tree’s needle life.

One more thing about bringing trees in from the cold. Remember that time you wandered for hours looking for the perfect tree, chopped it down, spent another hour trying to get it secured to the top of your car, wrestled it into the house and stayed up all night decorating it? It was a thing of beauty, a breathtaking sight — and it was raining needles within a week! You were dismayed and bewildered. It was a fresh tree for heaven sake! Well, here’s what happened.

You may remember that it was really cold that day, and had been for some time. The forest had hunkered down into deep-cold survival mode and was in no mood to donate its inhabitants for your party. Yes, you guessed it — it was nature’s revenge! No, no really. It was, once again, that extreme temperature difference. Even a cut tree has to have a hardening off period when it’s brought in from the cold. So go easy on your tree this year. Don’t yank it indoors too quickly. Give it a chance to warm up slowly, perhaps in a cool entryway or garage. As long as you cut the trunk off once more just before you place it in water, and as long as you keep it watered, you’ll be rewarded with a lovely evergreen that will last as many weeks as you want to keep its company.

Sally Koppenberg is a garden and food designer. She is the owner of Stonehill Gardens and The Red Beet, nursery and catering companies specializing in Alaska Grown foods, trees, shrubs, perennials and native plants. Contact her at stonehill@gci.net.