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The Kid Should See This

How are Christmas trees harvested?

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“…And so it goes, picking and dropping 750 loads per day.” This is how Christmas trees are harvested with extra speed for the holiday season. But who is doing the picking and dropping? Would you be surprised to learn that it’s a helicopter pilot?

Follow the life cycle of a Christmas tree for an entire year, from “teeny two-year-old saplings to ten-year-old giants,” with this True Food TV video. Host Nicole Cotroneo Jolly visited the largest contiguous Christmas tree farm in America, the Noble Mountain Tree Farm in Oregon, to see how Douglas firs, noble furs, and grand firs are grown, shaped, cut, flown, processed, and delivered to your local corner tree lot.

trees from above
harvesting trees with a helicopter

While you and I start thinking about Christmas trees around Thanksgiving, Christmas tree growers tend to them 365 days a year. They don’t just plant them in the ground and forget about them until they’re all grown up and ready for cutting. If you want a Christmas card perfect tree then it requires years of all-season care and attention.

That includes using large shearing knives to prune those growing trees into that iconic Christmas tree shape.


Watch more True Food videos on their site.

Then watch more videos about trees and helicopters on TKSST:
• How Douglas Fir Trees Shaped The Northwest
How do trees survive winter?
• A Helicopter Team Installs Power Line Marker Balls
• What if there were 1 trillion more trees?
• Human-Powered Helicopters: Straight Up Difficult

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