About our Trees
At Urquhart's, we strive to provide our customers with a natural tree-cutting experience. Our trees are not trimmed and shaped into a cone like the ones you'll find at big box stores or tree lots. This results in a tree with a unique feel and more space for ornaments. We also avoid using pesticides, fungicides, and chemical fertilizers whenever possible. As a result, the trees you find in our fields are exactly how they'd grow in the wild, and no two are alike!
Why Choose a Real Christmas Tree?
There are a lot of misconceptions about real Christmas trees. Many potential buyers see them as fire hazards, and are worried about the environmental impact of cutting down a tree. In reality, a properly-watered Christmas tree is not a significant fire hazard due to their high water content. Fresh-cut Christmas trees are able to soak up water significantly better than trees from big box stores and tree lots, making them a very safe addition to your living room. Real trees are also a fully sustainable growing practice, and each real tree has a carbon footprint just 1/10th that of an artificial tree. Additionally, real Christmas trees are 100% biodegradable. And there's no denying a real tree will bring a fresh scent and appearance to your home that an artificial tree cannot.
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What Christmas Trees do we Sell?
We offer a variety of Christmas tree species, each with their own unique shapes, colors, and scents. Our staff will gladly help you identify the types and point you in the right direction to cut your perfect tree. Our most popular trees are the below species, but we do offer a few others in limited quantities, so feel free to ask if you have something else in mind!
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Fraser Fir (including Balsam Fir hybrids)
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Concolor Fir
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Canaan Fir
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Colorado Blue Spruce
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Black Hills Spruce (a.k.a. White Spruce)
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Eastern White Pine (very limited quantity)
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Noble Fir (pre-cut only)
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The Planting Process
Each spring, we plant more than 5,000 trees. Some of these trees are planted in new or reclaimed fields as a row crop, and others are "interplanted" between existing trees, which allows us to plant new trees in a field without the need to cut down older trees. Interplanting allows us to keep the closest fields full with a variety of trees for easy selecting, and it gives our farm a more natural feel versus the rows of identical trees you would find at other farms. This also gives families more opportunity to "hunt" for their tree, and many enjoy being able to spread out and walk multiple miles around the property before finding and selecting their perfect tree. For those who prefer a shorter walk, we have lots of options and guides to help narrow your search!
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Where do our Trees Come From?
We buy our trees as seedlings, usually between 6 and 18 inches tall. Before they arrive to our farm, they are grown in a greenhouse from seed, which takes as many as 4 years. Once in the ground, the trees take an additional 5 to 8 years before they are tall enough to be sold. So even a 6 foot tall Christmas tree could be more than 10 years old!
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Sometimes, we have gaps in our inventory due to unexpected demand or drought removing more trees than we planted. Since it takes at least 5 years to grow a tree, we may have to order some pre-cut trees from other farms to make sure we have enough of a certain size or type of tree for everyone who wants one. While many of our pre-cuts are fresh-cut from our farm, some come from other farms. Please talk to our staff if you'd like to know where a given tree came from. Our Noble Fir pre-cuts are imported from the Pacific Northwest, since that variety of tree can't be grown in Michigan.