The Farm

A Nordmann goes in as a two-year transplant and is cut at ten. It is hand-shaped every summer from year four — one person, one knife, about ninety seconds a tree, twelve thousand trees. That is six weeks of somebody’s July, every year, and it is the whole difference between a tree and a hedge.

We plant in blocks so there is always something at every height, which is why you can walk in on 20 December and still find a decent 7ft rather than the four nobody wanted.

Nothing is irrigated. On this hillside in Cumbria that has never once been a problem.

Every stump is left in the ground and the row is replanted between them, which keeps the soil structure and the mycorrhizae rather than rotavating both away every rotation.

Brash and offcuts are chipped on site and go back on the plantation tracks. Bring your tree back in January and we will chip that too — about six hundred come back each year, which is roughly one in five of what we sell.

We stopped using herbicide between the rows in 2019 and mow instead. It costs about nine days of labour a year and the field is full of skylarks in May, which we would not have predicted and are pleased about.

The one thing we will not claim is that a cut tree is carbon negative. It is a farmed crop that takes eight years to grow and about three weeks to enjoy. It is better than a plastic one you keep for four years and worse than not having one, and that is the honest arithmetic.