What the sky has to do with your Christmas tree
A tree farmer reveals why the quality of Christmas trees depends on the past year's weather
Whether you're planting a tree at home or picking out the perfect Christmas tree, weather plays a big role in how that tree will grow.
“This is our 80th year in business. I'm the third generation,” says Doug Drysdale, a Christmas tree farmer at family-owned Drysdale’s Tree Farms located in Egbert, Ont., just an hour north of Toronto. “It's 480 acres, so it's really big. I meet people all the time that have been coming and saying, you know, my dad used to bring us here, and now we're bringing our kids here. So it's kind of cute to see that.”
Doug Drysdale is a third-generation farmer at the family-owned Drysdale’s Tree Farms located in Egbert, Ont. (The Weather Network)
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With a legacy like that, it’s important for Drysdale’s to have the perfect crop of trees for families each year. But a lot of that has to do with mother nature.
“Snow is a good insulator and it protects the trees,” explains Drysdale. “The sun does the most damage, so on those warm, sunny days in March, the trees sometimes will get a sunburn or sun scald on the southwest side of the tree, and those needles will dehydrate, die and fall off, and the new growth will come out, and everybody will forget.”
Drysdale's Tree Farm is Located at 6635 County Road 56 in Egbert, Ontario, just an hour north of Toronto.(The Weather Network)
Drought conditions have the biggest impact on seedlings, but we won’t see the effects on product availability and prices until eight to ten years down the line.
“We plant more trees than we harvest all the time, because not every tree makes it,” Drysdale adds. “The first two years are really critical because rain to start a seedling off and get it established in the ground is so important. With the drought that we had in the summer, it was pretty bad, and a lot of the seedlings didn't make it. “
That means you should have lots of great trees to choose from this year.
You may think you want a big, full tree and not like the tree from the Charlie Brown Christmas movie, but experts say there's a sweet spot in the middle to help with your decorations.
“Sometimes the perfect trees are harder to decorate. It's kind of like 'Goldilocks syndrome',” cautions Drysdale. “One's too tall, one's too short, one's too fat, one's too skinny. The designer trees that people get, they want them a little bit thinner, a little bit more open, so that the decorations that they put are in the tree and not on the tree, but those are things that the family is going to decide on.”
WATCH BELOW: What the sky has to do with your Christmas tree
(Header image courtesy of Gustavo Fring via Pexels)