Our Concolor Fir Tree (Click on photo to enlarge.)
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Today Bill, Katie and I made our annual the-morning-after-Thanksgiving trip to choose and cut down the tree for Bill’s and my home. Because our traditional tree farm no longer sells cut-your-own trees, today our tree farm of choice was Hill’s Tree Farm located 1/2 mile south of the west edge of Minburn. The ad says that Hill’s Tree Farm is “open”: “Fri. 10-5 * Sat. 10-5 * Sun. 1-5 or by appointment.” Contact information given in the ad is 515-677-2389 or hchill@netins.net.
At Hill’s Tree Farm patrons have the choice of cutting their own trees or choosing from fresh pre-cut trees. As for tree variety, we compromised by choosing a Concolor Fir tree since Bill likes shorter needle trees and I like longer needle trees.
I’ve never really paid attention to the names of different varieties of Christmas trees; I appreciated that Hill’s Tree Farm had a little plot that included one of each variety of their trees.
Plot of six varieties of trees. (Click on photo to enlarge.)
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Close-ups of six varieties of trees. Clockwise from upper left: Concolor Fir, Douglas Fir, Scotch Pine, Canaan Fir, Fraser Fir and White Pine. (Click on photo to see the differences.)
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(Click here to go to Louise Gunderson Shimon’s home page.)
Marion Gunderson Art (and the Farmer's Daughter) 
November 27, 2010 at 11:20 pm |
These look like gorgeous trees! We grew concolor firs along the edge of the farmstead when we lived at the Rittgers farm and cherish the memory of the one we got to harvest for a Christmas tree. We have a couple huge ones at the Graeber farm that also grew from seedlings. Love them because they are not prickly like our blue spruce is. It is so good to know that there are others who still relish cutting their own tree.
November 27, 2010 at 10:39 pm |
Marsha: Until yesterday, I didn’t even know what a Concolor Fir was! I remember your Christmas tree being so beautifully decorated. I can just imagine the tree-harvesting memories you must cherish. Yes, I, too like that it isn’t as prickly, and I think (therefore) isn’t supposed to drop needles as soon as some of the other varieties. Last year we thought we could be fine without cutting our tree, since the place where we always did cut no longer offered that option. But, it just didn’t “do it” for us, so we are glad to be back to cutting again.
November 27, 2010 at 10:41 pm |
We have a pond near by. We used to, after the holidays, let the neighbors who owned the pond put our Christmas tree in their pond, since that would be good for the fish.