Content
Spruce belongs to the pine family. It grows in Asia, America and Europe. It is not so easy to grow a Christmas tree at home, as it needs careful care. The most common types that are grown at home in a pot are common and silver spruce. In addition to these varieties, you can still grow araucaria (indoor spruce). Araucaria can be grown at home in a pot all year round if the tree is properly cared for.
Content rules
Lighting
In order to grow a Christmas tree at home in a pot, you need to properly care for it. The tree loves bright lighting. It is necessary to grow young specimens in a bright and warm place, while the pot of spruce should be protected from the rays of the sun. Otherwise, it may negatively affect the further growing of the tree.
Temperature
In the cold season, ate needs coolness. In this season, the temperature regime should range from +6 to +10 ° С. The forest beauty can quite easily tolerate freezing temperatures, only it is required to monitor the soil clod so that it does not freeze.
With the arrival of warm days, it is recommended to take the spruce to the balcony, and shade it from the scorching sun.
Watering mode
To grow a Christmas tree in a pot, you need to provide it with proper care. Watering is the main component in growing a forest beauty. The tree should be watered abundantly from March to September.
The soil is not allowed to be excessively wet or too dry. In winter, the frequency of watering is reduced to 1 time in 20 days if the temperature in the room is +6 - + 10 ° С. At a temperature of 0 degrees, the tree is moistened once a month. Professionals advise to spray the tree from time to time, especially during cold weather.
Top dressing
Spruce does not need regular feeding. In summer, spruce is fertilized only about three times with universal dressings.
Earth substrate
If you want to grow a spruce tree from seeds, then an acidic soil is needed for this. You can purchase an earthen mixture for conifers or prepare it yourself at home. It is required to take universal soil and soil from a coniferous forest in the same proportions, and mix it all.
Transfer
The spruce tolerates the transplant rather painfully. It is recommended not to disturb the earthen ball and to prevent the roots from exposing. You need to replant the tree 2 times a year, around May.
Reproduction
To grow a tree at home in a seed pot, you need to take the seeds from the cones, which are harvested from mid-autumn to the end of winter. At home, seeds are sown no deeper than half a centimeter. During the rooting period of seedlings, the container should be placed in a well-ventilated room.
Saplings that are one year old grow from 15 to 25 centimeters, it all depends on the type and conditions.
Most common problems
In order to grow a Christmas tree at home in a pot, you should adhere to competent care, otherwise there may be problems with growing.
- The needles turn yellow and crumble. This usually occurs with improper care (sunburn, low or high temperatures, improper watering regime.) Affected branches cannot be restored. You can only make changes to the conditions of detention and use drugs that increase the immunity of plants. Funds are purchased in special stores.
- The needles wrinkled. This indicates that the earth is not completely oxidized. Add soil from under conifers to the top layer of soil. The roots of the tree should not be exposed, and the ground level should not be changed.
If you adhere to all the listed tips on how to properly grow a Christmas tree at home in a pot, then you can get a beautiful and lush spruce without much difficulty.
On the eve of the New Year, the question of the Christmas tree as the main symbol of the holiday arises more and more acutely. Opponents of plastic wood in the apartment understand that a spruce felled in the forest is not an option, because it costs a lot, but it will begin to crumble pretty soon. The most logical decision seems to be to grow and decorate a plant in a pot for the holiday - minimum costs, no cleaning, and not a single Christmas tree will suffer due to traditions.
Can you grow your own spruce?
As a New Year's, in principle, any plant can become, at least from a distance resembling a coniferous, for example, cypress or boxwood. For those who are not looking for easy ways and strive to achieve perfection in everything, it's time to study the question of how to grow a Christmas tree at home, because this is more than real!
The biggest difficulty in growing a Christmas tree at home is the limited ability of a city apartment to provide a so-called dormant period for the spruce. If you pay attention to the life cycle of an ordinary forest tree, it is not difficult to notice that during the year the temperature regime that it has to endure varies from +30 heat in the summer to frost - 30 in the winter months. Fir-trees easily tolerate such temperature changes throughout the year, moreover, these conifers are perfectly adapted to them, and violation of the temperature regime only leads to diseases of the firs.
That is why it is better to start growing a Christmas tree in an apartment if there is a loggia or other cold and cool place. You should also be prepared that in two or three years the tree will have to be transplanted into the natural conditions of the forest, because in nature spruce trees reach a height of several tens of meters, and for a tree of such dimensions, of course, neither a pot of earth, nor even the largest size is enough rooms.
On average, spruce lives for about 300 years, but sometimes its age can be up to 600 years. The oldest Christmas tree on Earth is now almost a thousand years old, and it grows in Sweden. "Old Tikko" - that is the name of the tree - lives and lives in Fulufjellet National Park and is revered as the oldest arboreal organism on the planet.
How to grow a spruce
You can grow a Christmas tree at home in several simple and affordable ways for everyone.
- From a seed.
By growing your own tree from a seed, you are guaranteed not to break the law (after all, in some regions of the country it is forbidden to dig trees in the forest) and get a Christmas tree, almost from birth adapted to a new place of residence in your house.
What you need to do to grow a tree from scratch:
- Collect some mature buds of the desired type of spruce that have opened in natural conditions.
In autumn, somewhere in October, you need to go to the nearest park or forest and look for open cones with seeds in them under the trees. If you bring a closed cone home, it will also open, but the seeds in it may not be fully ripe.
Fir-trees belong to gymnosperms and they arose much earlier than angiosperms (flowering) plants. Due to their characteristics, gymnosperms often displace other plants from the growing territory. The most striking example of such a neighborhood is Christmas trees and birches. At first, small spruces, loving moisture and shade, grow under the crowns of birches, then they grow taller than them, later they shade deciduous trees and acidify the soil, thereby finally destroying trees of other species.
- Plant the seeds in a pot and place in a cool place (preferably a refrigerator) for a couple of months.
Generally trees grow and adapt to absolutely any land from swamps to rocky soil, from sand to clay, but best of all, the spruce, of course, will grow on fertile black soil. It will also be important to add a little soil to the pot from under the spruce, under which you found a cone with seeds.
- After two months, when the seeds are ready to germinate, you should put the pot on a windowsill, on which it is not very hot and not too dark.
By the spring, your Christmas tree will be about 5 cm in size, and after two or three years it will reach a height of half a meter and will ask to be transplanted into the garden.
- From a seedling.
If you do not have the opportunity, desire or time to grow a Christmas tree from a seed, then you can immediately purchase a spruce seedling. It will certainly be a plant in a pot with a closed root system at the age of just two to three years, that is, ready for transplanting into open ground.
In recent years, it has become popular to acquire a spruce seedling just before the New Year in order to celebrate cheerfully, smelling the needles of a real live Christmas tree, and in the spring to transplant it into a park or forest.
Among the ancient peoples, the spruce was considered a sacred tree, they worshiped it, looked after and decorated it in every possible way. Having become Christians, the Europeans, nevertheless, preserved a number of pagan traditions, including decorating the Christmas tree, only now at Christmas. And Peter I, wanting that his state fully comply with European canons, introduced this tradition on the territory of Russia.
By choosing this way to celebrate the New Year, indeed, you can kill at least two birds with one stone: do not harm the environment, condoning the felling of trees for the sake of traditions, and contribute to the normalization of the ecological situation by planting a new tree in the spring.
In order for the seedling to take root and feel good in the open field, you need to study the features of its existence until the moment it is in your hands. That is, it is better to select a tree for which you already have suitable conditions. In other words, if, for example, you want to have a Christmas tree in your yard, then the seedling should be chosen according to the conditions of your yard, and not hope that a two or three year old tree will be able to adapt to the changed conditions... This is extremely unlikely, and most likely, if the light and thermal conditions and the nature of the soil are too different, the Christmas tree will begin to hurt and may even die.
If the conditions for the "birth" of the tree and those in which you transplant it almost completely coincide, then all that remains is to immerse the tree in the hole exactly to the depth at which it was in the pot, and water in the event of a dry summer (about 10 liters of water in week during extreme heat).
- From a twig.
Another popular way, due to its effectiveness, to grow a Christmas tree yourself - from a twig or a cutting, as professional gardeners call it.
A twig about 20 cm long must be cut in spring or autumn from the top of a beautiful and healthy spruce, which is at least 5 years old, slightly cleaned of needles at the base and planted in the ground - in a pot at home or in a greenhouse on the street. In order for the stalk to be guaranteed to take root, you can soak its end for half an hour in a weak solution of potassium permanganate, and only then plant it in the ground. After planting, it is better to cover the stalk with a film and maintain the soil temperature at 21-26 degrees Celsius, and keep the air temperature at least 4-7 degrees. The first days before the roots appear, you need to water the newly-made seedlings several times a day, and then reduce the amount of water as they take root and take root in the soil. It is important to remember that Christmas trees do not like heat and direct sunlight, but they also cannot stand complete darkness.
How to transplant a spruce from the forest
If you have a house on your own land, and you want to start admiring an adult Christmas tree as soon as possible and lead round dances around it for the New Year, you can transplant the tree directly from the forest... The most important thing here is not to damage the root system of a sufficiently mature tree and, when planting, mix the soil from your site with the one from which the tree was taken.
It is best to replant the tree in the fall or spring, giving it abundant watering and protecting it at first and, if necessary, from the scorching rays of the sun and other extreme weather events that can adversely affect an already stressed tree.
In general, conifers do not like frequent changes of their place of residence, so you should not rely on the idea that a Christmas tree can be kept in an apartment for a while, then planted in open ground, and do this several times with the same tree.Sooner or later, you will have to part with your pet in favor of more natural conditions for her.
But there is also an option when not an ordinary forest Christmas tree grows at home, but a specially bred species. You can watch the video below about growing such specimens.
How to grow a spruce at home (video)
What you need to know about spruce trees?
Before you start planting seeds, you should find out a few interesting facts about this plant. I will say right away that growing spruce at home is not easy! The thing is that this plant does not like warmth too much; spruce trees prefer frosty air, especially in winter. It is very important that you have a place in your home where the temperature does not rise above 10 degrees in winter. And if there is none, then it is worth abandoning the planting of spruce, and no special care will help here.
When planning to grow spruce from seed, be sure to make sure that the tree's seeds are fully ripe. It is a mistake to believe that if the cone has opened, then the seeds are 100% ripe - even unripe seeds open in the heat. It is better to collect seeds from the cones of the current year's harvest, preferably in late autumn before the first frost.
For growing spruce from a twig, only the top is suitable. Of course, you can try to root the side branch, but then, most likely, the tree, when it grows up, will be a little "short" on one side.
Planting spruce from seed
It is recommended to plant spruce seeds by the end of April, but these seeds need to be prepared first. To do this, we remove them from the cones, inspect them externally in order to reject the damaged ones. Soak good seeds in a slightly pinkish solution of potassium permanganate for half an hour, then dry them before germination. To "trick" the seeds, we put them in the refrigerator until spring.
We remove the future Christmas trees from the refrigerator, and soak them in cold water for a day. Planting seeds is best done in the "native" soil from the coniferous forest. We do not deepen the seeds, but simply put them on top of the black soil, slightly crushing them with soil from above. We protect the seed tray from direct sunlight. A month after the emergence of seedlings, they can be carefully dived into separate pots. For the first year, it is recommended to add a weak mullein solution to the water when watering as a mineral fertilizer.
Planting spruce from the top
For this method, we need a one-year shoot from the top of the spruce. We carefully cut it off, remove all the needles from below by 5-6 centimeters. The peeled part of the branch should be placed in a weak solution of potassium permanganate for half an hour. To root a young plant, it is recommended to plant it in a greenhouse or an impromptu film greenhouse in the spring. An ideal soil mixture for these purposes is considered to be ordinary soil collected in a coniferous forest, diluted by a third with washed river sand. During the rooting period, it is recommended to irrigate the seedling with a sprayer two to three times a day. You should also make sure that the ground in the greenhouse does not dry out, and that direct sunlight does not fall on the young Christmas tree. After the appearance of the first spraying roots, we do it twice less often, we cover the Christmas tree from the sun only from lunchtime. Experts recommend not replanting a seedling for 3-4 years, only in this case we will get an adult, healthy tree, which will transfer its “move” to a permanent place without any special consequences.
It is obvious that growing spruce at home is a task for the strong in spirit. But I assure you that you will succeed if you follow the advice of professional gardeners.
