Stump-Grown Christmas Trees Are the Gift That Keeps on Giving
Using the sustainable and ancient method of coppicing, evergreen Christmas trees can be regrown indefinitely
By Alla Katsnelson
December 20, 2018
Even if you’ve never been to a Christmas tree farm, you can probably call up a mental picture: a field of shapely evergreens growing in orderly, well-spaced rows. That image wouldn’t be far off for most of the 15,000 or so Christmas tree farms in the U.S., but it’s not at all what you’d see at Pieropan Christmas Tree Farm, located in a speck of a western Massachusetts town called Ashfield. Customers who walk the maze of paths through Pieropan’s hillside balsam grove won’t see a single row of trees. In fact, it might take a good 10 minutes of hiking before they spy a tree with the classic skirted triangle shape—and when they do, they’ll realize that it’s a few feet off the ground, growing off a stump.
Pieorpan Farm’s trees are grown using a land management technique called stump culture, or coppicing—cutting down trees to allow new shoots to form from the stump. Most conventional Christmas tree farms require intensive land management with fertilizers and insecticides, and after a tree is cut down, its stump must be dug out and a new tree replanted. By contrast, Pieropan’s owner, Emmet Van Driesche, doesn’t fertilize, spray or irrigate his trees, most of which were planted decades ago. A single stump can support an older tree and a younger tree at the same time, thereby increasing production. Different plant and tree species commingle with the evergreens, and insects and other animals are more than welcome. “It’s a very rich ecosystem—that’s a big part of its value,†Van Driesche says.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/coppice-farming-grows-christmas-trees-keep-giving-180971068/#5lm5kUbgu5rXlftb.99
