About this column:
Semi –retired with her husband on a western Maryland Christmas tree farm, Cindy is a freelance journalist and novice grandmother. She used to live in Columbia and work for the Rouse company.Most Christmas trees in the U.S. are raised by part-timers or farmers who also grow annual crops. But that’s not the case for my husband and me. We raise evergreens full-time on our 370-acre western Maryland tree plantation and paychecks come once a year – once our annual harvest is finished by Thanksgiving weekend. Until 2005, we nurtured thousands of Christmas trees and then retailed them in Howard County for partial benefit of the YMCA. Now, we take special orders in September for large trees up to 35-feet tall and house-sized pines and firs destined for retail tree lots in the Baltimore-…
