30 Year Overgrown Xmas Tree Farm?????

[SURDO]

About 30 years ago my grandfather planted about an acre of Christmas trees planning on having a Christmas tree farm. He never actually followed through with his plan and i now have an acre or so of 30 year old Christmas trees. They are placed about 4 feet or less from one another and all the branches are dead or with no needles from the ground up to about 10 feet or so due to them being squished too closesly together. My question is how much space should i put inbetween each tree when i thin them? My other question is if i should cut all the dead branches off the trees even if that means most of them will have no branches from the ground all the way up to about 10 feet or so. My goal is to thin them out and have a much healthier thinner pack of trees. Thanks a lot for your help.
Drew

 

[yooper]

If they are balsam, I would wait until the wreath companies are buying bows to make wreaths, cut every other one or cut 2 and leave one. save the good tops to sell as Christmas trees and the remaining bows sell to a wreath making factory. not sure if the wood would be worth selling in your area. try to turn it into cash if you can

 

[brnchbrkr]

Pics Please!

Guessing 15" diameter Trunks measured 12" off the ground...

One heck of an xmas tree to put on the roof of your car/ truck...;-)

xmas boughs or wreaths sounds good, but need to establish your market.

Sounds like a safe haven for nature...deer?

 

[yooper]

One heck of an xmas tree to put on the roof of your car/ truck...;-)

one would have to cut it the size of a christmas tree and not leave it 12 feet long

 

[yooper]

xmas boughs or wreaths sounds good, but need to establish your market.

never thought about that, here where I live there is a big market for balsom boughs and cedar boughs and cones also, oct and nov.

 

[yooper]

Sounds like a safe haven for nature...deer?

If thined out well enough at least you can see them while they are in your scope! yum yum good eaten!

 

[serial killer]

A significant portion of my property was planted 50 years ago as a 4-H Christmas tree project. As soon as I moved in, I started clearing out the dead ones. Now I have several stands of giant mixed evergreens that are still choking each other out. I just keep cutting them and throwing the big chunks onto the bonfire.

By the end of the year I will have them thinned to the point where they should be able to live properly, but they've been grown so crowded that none of them have any kind of branch structure. It's amazing how little green growth that those trees require to keep themselves alive. Most of them, you would be hard pressed to get a decent Christmas tree out of the top of a 60-80 footer.

As much as I hate to say it, you are probably best off clearcutting it and replanting. That's probably the way my property will turn out in the next 5 years. I will save a couple of real giants and then grow trees that are more suited. And I might start a small Christmas tree farm of my own, but I plan on harvesting a lot sooner than 50 years.

 

[SURDO]

Yeah it would most defiantly be difficult to get Christmas trees out of the tops of the trees. I am not looking really to make a dollar off of these trees but rather have them be healthier and look better. They are not quite big enough to be sold for firewood so i will probably thin them out and just use them for personal firewood use. The patch of trees looks much different once i cut the dead branches off which consisted of the branches from the ground to about 12 feet up. I would guess only the top third or so of the trees are green.

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

I would guess only the top third or so of the trees are green.

That is how stand grown trees look, and how we get the knot free #1 clear wood. Grow them together tight as young, then thin the stands so the best can grow.

Recent work down in the Amazon has shown that there is a fractal based algorithm that can determine the distance between mature trees of given species. I think i saw that on a Nova episode. They used branch size and nodal lengths int eh computations.

FWIW