The weekend of Oct 25, I guess, Anne said, “darn, another year has gone by and we didn’t plant any Christmas trees.”
Neither Arlene, Anne, nor I ever had Christmas trees when we were kids. I wanted one when I was little, but my parents were against it. When I started going to sunday school at the Flushing Free Synagogue in Flushing, NY, I heard a sermon by a slightly older kid about why Jewish kids shouldn’t have Christmas trees, and I was convinced, and didn’t ever want one of my own after that. But I spent a Christmas vacation from college with Peter Brown’s family in Lexington MA, and one when I was in graduate school with Keith Allen’s family in Fredricksburg VA, and enjoyed those times a lot. I like the Christmas spirit, and I learned that there really is a Santa Claus. Matt grew up with Christmas trees, and wasn’t going to give them up just because he married a Jewish woman. So he and Anne have had one.
I said, “Go look on the internet, and I bet you can find a place to buy seedlings for two bucks each.” Sure enough, she found Nurseryman.com. Matt wasn’t sure he wanted to spend $75 on a lot of seedlings, but I asked, “how many would you need to grow to break even at Cambridge prices?” Really, only two good trees — so Anne ordered 25 blue spruce and 25 Fraser fir seedlings.
They arrived in Newton on Thursday. Arlene and I spent most of Sunday planting them in Casco.
Oops! I shouldn’t have rotated that picture. That’s fifty trees between the two packages, with an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper with planting instructions next to them for scale. The planting instructions say, “you should really think of this as having bought root systems.” The trees will grow, but it’s the roots that really count, and many of them are twice as long as the trunk part (if you can call it that without giggling.)
It’s hunting season in Maine in November. You don’t want to be out in the woods without a whole lot of hunter orange clothing, and probably not even then, except that there’s no hunting on Sunday. That was a reason we didn’t hurry north on Saturday; we wouldn’t have wanted to be working outdoors any distance at all away from the house that day.
We put about a dozen seedlings along the driveway. We marked off an area of “the logging road”, sort of a continuation of our driveway that had been clearcut used as a road when the previous owners of the property had sold the biggest trees on the property to a logging company, as a planting area, and cut down the weeds, brambles, and small pine trees on it, and planted twenty-five or thirty seedlings in relatively neat lines. Then we went out to the far side of the property to a little clearing we call “the patio” and planted the remaining dozen or so out there.
I put a little tag of yellow plastic tape in the ground next to each seedling to make them easier to find. And they need some help! They’re tiny.
Here’s an overview of the tree farm plot. We left a few larger pines which I should prune and maybe they’ll be suitable for Christmas trees too someday, but they tend to look like the one in the Charlie Brown special. See what I mean about needing the yellow tape to find the seedlings? I photoshopped in an arrow, too, because even the yellow tape isn’t enough in this picture.
