Sherwood's Almanac

November 2009

Starting the Christmas tree maze
Hottest November on record.

Week starting 1 November 2009

Amazing Idea.

This may be a crazy notion. Kerry Hardy, the VP at the school I used to work at, kept bugging me about when I was going to have Christmas trees for sale. Last March I found a site, (PickYourOwn.Org) [http://PickYourOwn.org] that had a Christmas tree section. I filled out info. Test the market. See if there is any interest. We started getting calls in October.

'Ok', thought I, 'there's a market'.

However, the prospect of going up and down rows of trees looking for your perfect tree is boring. My goal was to capture in miniature the adventure of going to the woods. On the other hand it Christmas trees didn't work out, I wanted to be able to treat these as field grown trees.

Currently I have more land than I can use for a one man operation. So getting the ultimate tree density is not that big a concern.

So I hooked up the bushhog to the tractor and cut a 5 mile spaghetti trail on 16 acres of my land. My plan is to plant the variable sized blocks with single species of trees. So I'd have a block of balsam fir here, and a block of Meyers spruce there, and a block of ponderosa pine here and so on. This way people can get lost while looking for a tree. I'll also end up with a neat set of trails for snowshoeing, cross country skiing and so on.

Will it work? Who knows.

Week starting 15 November 2009

We are leaving at the end of the week to go on holiday -- two week road trip through Vancouver, Orcas Island, Yakima, Clarkston, and back home, seeing friends and relatives along the way.

Meanwhile the weather has continued unseasonably warm. So Conor and I have been planting like crazy. We'll get some 500 trees in place in the Christmas tree maze before I go.

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Sherwood's Forests is located about 75 km southwest of Edmonton, Alberta. Please refer to the map on our Contact page for directions.

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