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Hi, guys!
I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday!
I had to take the week off due to work I’m having done on my house. I’m currently still locked up in a spare room, surrounded by boxes and furniture from around the house, and cut off from my main computer, working on a laptop without most of my files and passwords. Not the best scenario for productivity, to say the least.
Plus, I’m sort of imprisoned because I can’t leave while the workers are here, which has been from 8 am to 5 pm, 6 days and counting.
But enough about me.
🕎 I’m sending light and love to all those celebrating Hanukkah later this week!
🎄 And if you celebrate Christmas, it’s time to think about your Christmas tree.
If you’re buying a live one, here’s a vintage video from The Vault in which I explain the difference between Noble, Balsam and Fraser fir, and how to ensure you select a fresh tree that will survive the holidays, regardless of variety.
I’m often asked by folks who want to do right by the environment whether the annual purchase of a tree that’s been chopped down is better than the one-time purchase of an artificial tree. And it’s quite a conundrum.
There are good arguments for both sides, so after hearing (reading) them, it will be up to you to take into account your buying and usage habits and decide which makes the most sense to you.
If you were to, say, walk into the woods, find a tree you like and chop it down yourself, that would have a negative effect on the environment because you would be removing an oxygen producer that is serving an important role in the ecosystem. If, however, you were to purchase a live tree from a Christmas tree farm, or a retailer who obtains trees from one, the environmental impact mostly comes from growth support and transport.
Tree farms replace their annual harvests by planting more trees, and those new trees take many years to reach Christmas-tree size. During those years, as the trees photosynthesize, they continually remove carbon dioxide from the air and release clean oxygen for us, all the while playing host to beneficial insects and serving as a pollution barrier.
Real trees decompose after they’re disposed of because they’re biodegradable. Dust to dust, as they say. Artificial trees, not so much at all.
Fake trees are made of PVC plastic in a manufacturing process that pollutes the environment, and they are mostly imported from China (traveling such a distance, in itself, has environmental implications of its own). And fakes can’t be recycled so the trees of Christmases past, present and future will be sitting in landfills for, well, maybe forever.
However, there’s an argument to be made that buying an artificial tree and keeping it for many years is kinder to the environment than buying even a farm-grown tree every year, as the care of natural trees during the decade or so until they reach maturity requires substantial water resources, fertilizers that have the potential to pollute soil and drinking water, and carbon-emitting trucking to transport them to a retailer near you.
And that argument has some merit.
So the long and the short of it is 🤷🏽
I grew up with an artificial tree but have been buying real ones for the past 30 years. At the end of every season, my husband would remove all its branches, and I would spread them around the garden to protect plant roots over winter. The trunk would spend winter outdoors and, months later, get burned in the firepit.
But this year, the first on my own, an artificial tree is looking more attractive. I’m just not sure I’m up to shopping, hauling, erecting, decorating, cleaning up after and dragging the tree out to the curb by myself. I’ll let you know what I decide.
📬 Ask Jessica
DEAR JESSICA: I’m hoping you can give me some advice to save my Leyland cypresses. They are turning pretty brown. —Bob Lenaghan
DEAR BOB: I recently wrote a column about browning evergreens. Browning and dropping of inner needles at this time of year is often part of their normal aging process and no cause for concern. But sometimes, the symptoms are simply due to the weather or your watering and other cultural practices. Other times, insects or diseases are to blame.
I couldn’t definitively diagnose your tree, so I sent your photo to a plant pathologist friend, Dr. Margery Daughtrey over at Cornell University. She’s a plant-disease guru who has helped me out many times over the years, and she said she’s currently swamped with questions from homeowners that are similar to yours. Here are her suspicions — and recommendations for your own sleuthing.
Together with the information in the column linked above, they hopefully will help you get to the bottom of the matter.
“Leyland Cypresses should be planted in full sun, but often they are crammed into hedge plantings with some shade overhead. Worse yet, sometimes they get hit directly with lawn irrigation.
We see several fungus-caused dieback diseases on them. The main two are Diplodia tip blight, caused by a species different from the one that affects pine trees, and Seridium blight, caused by a fungus that has been very damaging to landscape plantings in the south.
When there is browning on a Leyland Cypress, it should be pruned out. The trees should be protected from drought, but the foliage should not be hit directly with irrigation. They will appreciate trickle-irrigation at the soil line delivered as needed (more with a new planting than an established one).
💡 If you do one thing this week…
Inspect arborvitaes and junipers for bagworms. It’s nasty business, but the best method of removal, should you find any, is to pick them off by hand and destroy them. Maybe wear gloves.
👏 Sunday shoutout
Reader Harold White sent in this lovely photo of his mulberry tree. “It’s shedding its first leaves of fall, which will make good leaf mold.”
I like the way you think, Harold!
Send in your photo, and you could be featured next. Please include your hometown, and you’ll get bonus points if you’re in the picture!
📰This week in my Associated Press gardening column
I write a weekly gardening column for the AP, so you might have seen my byline in your local paper (or news website) — wherever in the world you happen to be. In case you miss it, I’ll post the most recent here every week.
THIS WEEK: Are your evergreens turning brown? That might or might not indicate a problem. Here’s what you need to know.
LAST WEEK: How to help houseplants reacclimate indoors after their summer
ONE WEEK PRIOR: There’s a movement to ‘leave the leaves’ in gardens and lawns. Should you do it?
BEFORE THAT: If it seems like there are a lot of acorns this fall, you might be seeing a mast year
You can read all my AP gardening columns here.
📚📺🎵 Random things I enjoyed this week
I’ve already told you about the mess in my house and my virtual imprisonment, which I decidedly am not enjoying, and that’s my big news this week.
But I did (of course) watch some good TV, starting with Squid Game: The Challenge. If you watched the South Korean blockbuster Squid Game, you absolutely should put this real-life British reality/game show on your queue. It’s wild.
I also watched a new-to-me 2017 movie called American Made about a drug-smuggling CIA enlistee who played a key role in the rise of the Medellin cartel and even the Iran-Contra scandal. It’s based on a true story, which is mind-boggling. Nov. 30 was its last day on Netflix, but if you can find it elsewhere, it’s worth a watch, especially if you were around in the ‘80s.
I’m too traumatized about the finale of The Golden Bachelor to talk about it. But, yes, I watched that, too.
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📧 How’m I doing?
I welcome your comments and suggestions, so please send them along — as well as any topics you’d like to see covered and questions you’d like answered in the Ask Jessica section.
definitely getting a live tree from a tree farm. I find it simply magical that I can have a tree in my house and that I can connect with my earliest memories through the ornaments I place on it. A kind of druidic festival for me as my holiest day is the winter solstice and I need a tree to feel the force of the mystery the solstice represents.
We always had artificial Christmas trees when I was growing up. I continued with that tradition when I got married mostly because I was the one who did most of the decorating. My husband was given a real tree one year so we gave it a try. I had quite a few heavy ornaments that I called branch sitters. They needed to be put where they were hooked on one branch & sat on the branch below it. These ornaments were not working well on the real tree & I was getting frustrated by my attempts to decorate the tree. It was taking much longer than it should in my opinion. The real tree was in our house for about a week when I began to have migraine symptoms that plagued me even when I was in another room & then it got to the point that I was bedridden from the symptoms I was experiencing. My husband took the tree out of the house. I was better several days later. I still don’t know exactly why this happened to me. My best guess is that the water the tree was sitting in triggered my mold allergies & brought on the migraines. Go figure!