Howard County's Christmas Tree Farms

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, you can cut your own Christmas tree at two Howard County choose-and-cut farms: Greenway Farms and Triadelphia Lake View Farm.

More than just Christmas trees, these farms offer a family outing and provide free parking, saws for cutting trees and extra attractions, depending on the farm.

“We’ll have Santa Claus sitting in an antique sleigh in our Christmas shop,” said Linda Brown of Triadelphia Lake View Farm in Glenelg.

“He’ll be on hand Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and folks can bring their own cameras for pictures.”

The farm has several varieties of trees, wreaths and garlands and provides space for the Dayton 4-H Club to sell refreshments.

“We do pretty good business,” Brown said. She said the farm is a draw for Howard County residents and "some customers come from Virginia too.”

Most Christmas trees in the U.S. are raised by part-timers or farmers who also grow annual crops. But that’s not the case for my husband and me.

We raise evergreens full-time on our 370-acre western Maryland tree plantation, and paychecks come once a year—once our annual harvest is finished by Thanksgiving weekend.

Until 2005, we nurtured thousands of Christmas trees and then retailed them in Howard County for partial benefit of the YMCA. Now, we take special orders in September for large trees up to 35-feet tall and house-sized pines and firs destined for retail tree lots in the Baltimore-Washington area.

While trees were once cut wild in the forest, virtually all of today’s holiday trees are grown on plantations like ours and harvested in November. This year, we cut some 800 trees, including our specialty: large, sheared Concolor and Douglas fir. Trees from our farm, Pinetum, will grace the CIA headquarters, Johns Hopkins Hospital grounds and Baylor University in Texas, to name a few customers.

Each large tree requires a half-day’s work to cut, pluck from the ground with a forklift and tie either by hand or with a machine that compresses and wraps the tree in protective string or mesh for shipment. My husband custom-made a tree baler to tie the huge trees since none were available commercially.

Most living-room-sized trees grow 8 to 14 years before they’re harvested, but some of our large trees are as old as they are tall. And while harvest is an intense time, we work year-round tending to our tree crop. Beginning when trees are knee-high, annual shearing helps yield trees that are full and tapered gracefully from top to bottom.

And talk about a thoroughly green product! Even after they’re cut and used as a fragrant symbol of the holidays, cut trees will decompose quickly if they’re chipped and used as mulch. When they're growing, Christmas trees provide wildlife habitat and soil stability; one acre of Christmas trees provides the daily oxygen for 18 people.

About this article: Semi–retired with her husband on a western Maryland Christmas tree farm, Cindy Stacy is a freelance journalist and novice grandmother. She used to live in Columbia and work for the Rouse company.