September tidbits

A few interesting things going on this week.

First, don’t forget to vote for the Trees for Troops program in the Pepsi Refresh grant contest. You can vote once per day online AND once per day by text. That’s 2 votes per day. USE THEM!! Click here.


Second, now that the schools are back in session, many tree farms are planning out their farm tours with school and youth groups. Harvest season and Christmas season are the most popular times for school tours at Christmas tree farms. Although, I’m sure many would love to have the groups out during planting season in the spring too. Here’s a link to a great article about a tree farm in Virginia that does a fantastic job with tours. They go way beyond just “come visit our farm” and incorporate solid education for the kids into the tours. It’s written from the perspective of teaching other tree farm owners / managers how to do better tours, but I think it reads well for anyone, especially if you are a teacher or a youth group leader interested in taking your group of kids on a farm tour.

Third, keep an eye out for the news around the selection of the White House Christmas Tree. It’s taking place a little earlier this year, September 28 to be exact. Now, they won’t actually harvest the tree selected until just before the presentation after Thanksgiving, but staff members from the White House will be visiting the farm of the Grand Champion and picking out which tree they would like. The Grand Champion for 2010 is Crystal Springs Tree Farm II in Lehighton, Pennsylvania. The farm is owned by Christopher Botek. You can read about him winning the National Tree Contest here .

Lastly, I was talking with a farm manager at the convention last month about purchasing trees online. His farm, The Rocks Christmas Tree farm in New Hampshire, sells a pretty large number of trees via online sales. The trees are shipped directly to your home. I was telling him that, while there had been numerous news stories about this over the years, it’s still somewhat of a surprise to most people that they can buy a tree this way. We even posted a video on our YouTube channel last year showing how the tree arrives and how easy it is to take one out of the box and set it up. Check it out here .

So our idea was to go even further and show a tree from “field to family room” as it were. He’s already selected a tree from one of his fields and tagged it. I can blog about it throughout the season and will post pics or vids of the tree all the way through the process until it’s set up and decorated in my home.

I don’t know....cool idea?

Here’s the photos of the tree selected.

Tree Farms Need Your Help in Supporting our Military

Help us bring an additional 5,000 military families together in SPIRIT this Christmas, just by clicking the mouse a couple times per day.

Trees for Troops in the Running for $250,000 in grant money from the Pepsi Refresh Project! I emailed the Rush Limbaugh show today to see if they would champion this effort by urging listeners to vote for us each day in September. You never know ...

Since 2005, Trees for Troops has reached over 67,000 military families by delivering fresh Christmas trees donated by American farmers to service members and their families across the U.S. We can add to that number with additional funds.

During the month of September, we are competing for a $250,000 grant in the Pepsi Refresh Project that will help deliver an additional 5,000 trees to military families this Christmas.

VOTE EVERY DAY DURING THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER!

Here's the link to vote for the T4T project ...you can also vote with a text from your cell phone. http://www.refresheverything.com/treesfortroops

Making an Eco-Friendly Christmas tree choice

I was asked recently by a magazine editor to sum up in a sentence or two why a farm-grown Christmas tree was better than fake, plastic tree. I struggled to get it down to one or two sentences (because the reasons are so many) but I can expand here.

From hybrid vehicles to water-saving toilets, many companies are trying to capture the interest of the environmentally conscious consumer. The Real Christmas Tree industry has it easy – our product has always been the environmental choice. The question is – do consumers know this?

In the fight for market share against artificial trees, the environmental issue is one where the real Christmas tree industry has the upper hand, but it’s up to us to make sure this message is heard and it’s been an uphill battle.

While they’re growing, Real Christmas Trees absorb carbon dioxide and other gases and emit fresh oxygen. They are grown on farms just like any crop. Christmas tree farmers plant new seedlings every spring to replace those harvested. In 2009, an estimated 45 million new trees were planted by North American Christmas Tree farmers. There are close to half a billion trees growing on tree farms in the U.S. alone. These trees would not exist if not planted by Christmas tree farmers. Christmas trees stabilize the soil to prevent erosion, protect green spaces and support complex eco-systems. And of course, farm-grown Christmas trees can be recycled, whereas fake trees can not.

What about the fake tree? Isn’t it better for the environment if you use something over and over? Artificial trees are a petroleum-based product manufactured primarily in Chinese factories. The average family uses a fake tree for only six to nine years before throwing it away, where it will remain in a landfill indefinitely. The polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used in most artificial trees has been boycotted by environmental groups.

Is the environment really that big a factor in consumers’ decisions? Yes, research shows that consumers are getting more and more eco-conscious when choosing products. Even if consumers do not recognize the environment as one of the factors in their decision, it is important that the correct facts about Christmas trees are out there.

Does anyone really still believe that Christmas Trees come from forests? Yes, unfortunately. But those in the business of farming and selling real Christmas trees have made great strides in recent years in breaking down the myths surrounding real Christmas trees.

Making fun of fake trees

OK, so I like to use the "slow season" to poke fun at fake trees. Here's an article from a publication called Christmas 365 that describes, in detail, how to clean a fake Christmas tree. In the summer time. It's 3 pages worth of instructions. Seriously.

ummmmm ....so I guess those arguments from fake tree people about their product being "more convenient" than a farm-grown Christmas tree are ...like, wrong? I can certainly think of WAY better things to do in the summer than get a fake tree out of storage and clean it, and I certainly think a real tree is WAY better in the first place.

Enjoy....and snicker.

500 Years and Counting!

We have a guest blog submitted this week by Richard Moore, President of the National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA) and his wife, Kay. Richard and Kay own and operate Moore Tree Farm in Groton, New York.

Above (l. to r.) are Franz Raith of Austria and President of The Christmas Tree Growers Council of Europe, Dick and Kay Moore, and Bernd Oelkers, of Germany, who hosted the meeting.

We recently returned from Hamburg, Germany where we attended the summer meeting of the Christmas Tree Growers Council of Europe (CTGCE) to discuss world wide plans for the 500th anniversary of the decorated Christmas Tree. The 500th anniversary plans call for highlighting, century by century, how trees were decorated from the 1500’s to the 21st century. Each century denotes changes from paper ornaments to hand painted works of art to today’s battery powered led displays.

The earliest recorded history of the decorated Christmas Tree is 1510 in the city of Riga in the northern European country of Latvia. According to their legend, the men of the Order of the Blackheads (a long-time merchant’s guild) decorated a tree with paper roses for the marketplace. The fir tree commemorated the Holy Child and the roses were a symbol of the Virgin Mary.

The Christmas Tree Growers Council of Europe is comprised of 13 member nations who represent a vast majority of the Christmas Trees grown in Europe. The two day summer meeting consisted of farm tours, nursery tours, and a ½ day business meeting. The Europeans prefer a more open, less dense tree since over 50% of the homes decorate their tree with real lighted candles. Nordman Fir accounts for upwards of 80% of the market and trees are planted on spacing’s as tight as 32” by 32”. By comparison, common spacing for trees on Christmas Tree farms here in the U.S. is 66” by 72”.

One particularly amazing thing we saw was specialized operator seated equipment that has a high degree of hydraulics; developed so that it can base prune, fertilize, spray, top shear and cut the trees for harvest…all in one machine. Jutek calls this their "portal tractor" to which all of the aforementioned devices connect. The Portal comes in many styles, both one and two row models, with or without cab, and optional spray out riggers to cover four rows at once.

More information about the above organizations can be found at:

WWW.CTGCE.com

www.christmastree.org

www.mooretrees.com