What is New Year without a tree – green and beautifully decorated? While a felled tree may end its life in the oven warming the house, most end up in the trash after the holidays. But there is another scenario for a New Year’s fairy tale – choose a Christmas tree in a pot. After the holidays, you can replant it, and it will delight you for many more years.
Potted Christmas trees are nothing new, and many retail outlets offer them during the holiday season. Attempts to plant such trees after the holidays do not always end successfully. The reasons may be different: perhaps the seller planted it in a pot at the last moment, damaging the roots, or we ourselves made mistakes in care. Therefore, it is worth familiarizing yourself with the basic rules that will help keep the tree healthy and successfully transplant it into open ground.
The Christmas tree is not a houseplant; it will not live long indoors
“The best solution is to plant the tree in the ground immediately after purchasing it and enjoy its appearance outside. It is completely unnatural for a tree to be in a room at a temperature of +20°C, and this is a strong stress for the tree“, explains Mike’s storyhead of the Smiltenes nursery “Latvijas valsts meži” (LVM).
This is probably the most reasonable approach, but many for various reasons do not take it into account, because where to leave gifts and how to enjoy the view of a decorated tree in a cozy room?
A warm room is the most harmful factor for a Christmas tree, as it can simply dry out. If you still decide to place it in the house, you need to moisten both the soil in the pot and the needles, and also place the tree in the coolest corner of the room – away from fireplaces and radiators. You can even bring the tree into the house only on New Year’s Eve itself, and before and after keep it on the balcony or terrace.
“It is important that the tree spends as little time as possible in a warm room, otherwise the tree may think that spring has come and begin to bud. If this happens, when returning outside in the cold, the buds will freeze, and the tree will not come to life in the spring. Most often, mistakes are caused by keeping the tree in a dry room for a long time and forgetting to water it.“, explains Baiba to Mika.
If you plan to replant your tree after the holidays, consider weather conditions. In cold but not frosty weather, the tree can be left on the terrace until spring. In severe frosts (-20°C), you need to adapt the tree, gradually transferring it from warm to cool, for example, keep it in the garage for a couple of weeks.
When to plant a Christmas tree?
Although trees are usually planted in the spring, you can transplant the tree from the pot into the ground immediately after the holidays, if the soil is not frozen. If the ground is covered with snow and frozen, the pot can be left outside, covered with snow, peat or spruce branches to protect the roots from frost. In the spring, after the ground has thawed, the tree can be replanted.
Source: www.gorod.lv
