How to cut your own christmas tree
Cutting down your Christmas tree makes a great outdoor adventure and a new tradition for your family. The entire experience includes a day in nature, picking your tree in its natural element, and a moderate amount of physical effort. Fresh-cut trees last longer in your home without drying out and dropping needles before the end of the Christmas season. All of this beats buying a tree from a parking lot tree stand or, worse, an artificial tree.
If you’ve never cut a tree before, plan to make a daylong adventure out of the experience. Plan to start with breakfast at a cozy café or lunch at a warm restaurant in a town you don’t normally visit. You have three good choices to cut your own tree:
- You can google search for “u cut Christmas trees near me”. Prices at “u-cut” tree farms are generally about the same as a tree lot full of previously cut trees, but the quality and freshness of the tree and the experience are usually much better at a “u-cut” tree farm.
- You can generally cut your own tree in the wild in a U.S. National Forest, and the cost is only $5 for a permit that can be purchased here. S. National Forests may not be practical to visit from your location, and the experience is much more wild than a cozy tree farm, but you cannot beat the wilderness experience, nor the price. Check here for more information including National Forest locations where you can cut your own tree in the wild.
- You can grow or cut a tree on private land with permission or your own land. There are millions of acres of private land that are overgrown, and many landowners would gladly let someone cut a small tree. If you have your own land you can cut your own tree. If you don’t have a suitably sized tree, you can plant your own tree by ordering a tree starter kit. You will need about 12 years before you have a full-sized Christmas tree, but if you plan ahead and if you have enough room, you can plant a tree every year, and then you will have a fresh tree every year.
One word to the wise about picking a tree in the wild: a tree may seem a bit smaller outdoors than it does inside your house. If you have seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation you know what I mean. If you have not seen the movie, stop right now and go see it. Don’t worry too much about an oversized tree, you can cut it to perfectly fit your house once you get home. If you want to be ahead and save yourself a few steps, use a tape measure to measure the height of your room from floor to ceiling, then subtract about 6 inches from that distance. A standard room height is 8 feet, so a 7-foot, six-inch tree is usually about right. Once you’ve picked the perfect tree, stick the tape measure tip up to the tip of the tree, and measure down the tree to the height of your room, minus six inches. The important thing is to measure the tree from the top and make the cut at the bottom to get the perfect height.
Once you have picked the perfect tree, there is usually plenty of tree and you may find that you are cutting the tree a foot or more from the ground, which is perfectly fine. At u-cut tree farms, they will usually have a special saw for you to use, called a bow saw. If you are cutting a tree on your own, you can get a bow saw for about 25 bucks, or if you want the Cadillac tool for cutting a little Christmas tree, check out this Skil battery powered chainsaw for about $130. Zip, zap, you will have the tree cut in seconds with this amazing, lightweight, and easy-to-use tool.
Regardless of the saw that you use, the “notch” is an important trick to cut a tree easily. Check out our instructional video for how to properly cut the notch. If you don’t cut the notch in the direction that you want the tree to fall, the weight of the tree will bind the saw blade and make cutting very difficult, even with a chainsaw.
Once you’ve cut your tree, a simple drag to your car and you’re almost home. If you don’t have a truck bed, securing the tree to the roof of your car is fairly simple. It’s easiest if you have a roof rack. Or cross bars to tie the tree to. Even if you don’t have a roof rack or a truck bed, simple straps or even string run through the open windows and around the roof/ceiling are plenty to tie the tree tight to your roof for the ride home.