Sprucing up the Holidays

New growth on a spruce

In the spring of 2015 we planted a bunch of spruces, to one day be a windbreak for our house, and also the bee yard. We planted them much closer together than fully grown trees would fit, otherwise we would have had to wait many years before the area would fill out and the trees would have any effect on the wind. As the trees grew, we would eventually have to thin them, much like people do with crops in their gardens. Whenever do that, I usually try to find a use for the thinnings. In the case of the spruce trees, the ‘thinnings’ are our Christmas trees.

Snow covered spruces in one of the windbreak areas.

This year is the first year that we were able to harvest one of those trees (the particular tree we harvested was actually from our tree nursery, where we had put a few extra trees we did not yet have space prepared for). It is still small, but it gave the trees around it some room to grow, and we had some tiny ornaments that looked really nice on it.

This year’s Christmas tree

(The title of this post was inspired by my Dad’s sense of humor.)