A rough idea of how many Christmas trees one acre of ground can carry is conveyed by the following table;

Spaced 4 ft. each way 2720 (table trees) Spaced 5 ft. each way 1740 (6-footers) Spaced 6 ft. each way 1210 (8-footers)

Often there is also a market for the boughs from cut trees or misshapen ones. These bring as high as four dollars per hundred pounds.

Christmas tree crops are planted in early spring, usually in generations a year or two apart. Be sure to heel-in your hundreds of seedlings as soon as you get them home, and water them well. Carry into the field, with their rootlets kept soaked in a bucket, only as many as you can plant on that trip.

The quickest way to open the ground is to plow spaced furrows, but doing so may provide rodents with runways, which you will regret. More laborious but safer is to "scalp" your planting spots with a mattock, cutting out sods at least six inches square.

After their first year, be prepared to weed around your seedlings; after their fourth, to shear and prune them; after their sixth, eighth, and tenth years to spray, and to "finish" them with more shaping.

Pamphlets on the culture and care of Christmas trees are among the most popular publications of the Conservation departments of States where they can be grown. From which fact, take this warning: almost everywhere the markets are glutting, or soon will be. In Michigan, for example, as against 1,205,000 trees sold in 1957, about 30,000,000 were reported maturing for 1962. Perhaps only half of these will reach market, and only the best half of that half actually be sold. More than in most tree lines, and nowadays increasingly, in Christmas trees only top quality pays off.