Every other Friday, the Outside/In team here at NHPR answers listener’s questions about the natural world. This week's question came from Mo in Epsom, New Hampshire.
“It's the middle of December and I'm driving around seeing lots of Christmas tree sale lots and I started to think about all the Christmas tree farms there are and how all of these Christmas trees have been cut off at the trunk. What happens to all the roots? What happens to all the land that those Christmas trees were on in those tree farms? Do they abandon that property? Or do they replant it?”
Producer Marina Henke got in the holiday spirit and looked into it.
Transcript
Marina Henke: I have to confess, I haven’t considered the humble Christmas tree stump much. When I was a kid, my family cut down our tree every year at our local tree farm right outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Once we strapped it to the top of our car and drove away — out of sight, out of mind. But, Americans cut down about 30 million Christmas trees every year, which means that’s 30 million stumps left in fields across the country. So, what’s the fate of all those fields?
Tim Gaudreau: It’s a really good question, but it also makes me laugh. Can you imagine if we had 10 acres of Christmas trees, cut it, “Ope! Move on, that’s it, that field is done.” One could never farm. We can barely do it as it is!
Marina Henke: Tim Gaudreau runs an organically-grown Christmas tree farm in Barnstead, New Hampshire. He mostly grows balsam firs, those are the ones with short, but sort of soft needles, with that classic holiday smell. Tim plants in blocks of Christmas trees, laid out in a grid. It takes his balsam firs between five and seven years to reach that classic Christmas tree height.
Tim Gaudreau: Once I open a block of trees up to be harvested, those trees will be cut over a few years before that block actually gets cleared out.
Marina Henke: This means that after each season, his fields typically have a combination of stumps and trees that are still growing.
Tim Gaudreau: So once the season's over, I go out with a chainsaw and I cut all those stumps right to the ground level. And then I leave them there.
Marina Henke: He leaves them there! Sometimes the answer really is that simple.
Tim Gaudreau: And I leave them there for a reason, though… one could go through the effort of pulling the stumps, but that's a lot of work.
Marina Henke: It’s not just a way to avoid a farm chore, though. Because as those stumps sit there, they start to decompose.
Tim Gaudreau: if you went through and started pulling stumps, you're going to pull the soil, and you'll remove that stump, which is biomass, which ultimately contains all this rich nutrient density that will return back to the soil if you give it a chance to decompose.
Marina Henke: Once all of a block has been fully cut…
Tim Gaudreau: Eventually that no longer has trees in it, and I let that block be fallow for a few years before I plant back into it.
Marina Henke: During that time, Tim plants cover crops – plants that protect and rejuvenate the soil. Buckwheat and oats. Clover and sunflowers. Meanwhile all those stumps and their roots just keep decomposing. If you’re driving by a fallow field, it might look like it’s been forgotten about.
Tim Gaudreau: But that is not abandoning, that is a strategy for building soil health.
Marina Henke: Not everyone uses this strategy though – some skip the fallow period, and just plant new seedlings right next to old stumps. As Tim told me, you ask 10 farmers this question and you’ll get just as many answers. So I decided it was high time I knew what happened to all those Christmas tree stumps I never thought about as a kid. I gave Meert Christmas Tree farm in Festus, Missouri a call.
Marina Henke: What do you do with the stump?
Victoria Meert: The stumps will decay. You can plant a new tree right to the next of the stump.
Marina Henke: That’s so cool to think that the Christmas trees that my family cut down are technically still in your soil! The stumps have just decomposed.
If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.
