Tales From the Tree Farm
Secrets of the 'Intense' Christmas Tree Harvest
Thanksgiving weekend is opening for most of Maryland’s choose and cut tree farms.
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-Washington area. While trees were once cut wild in the forest, virtually all of today’s holiday trees are grown on plantations like ours and harvested …
