Potted Christmas Trees: How to Keep Yours Alive for Next Year
A living tree can give you many Christmases - if you treat it right. Indoor timing, watering, summer care and when to plant it out.
A potted Christmas tree is the most sustainable way to do Christmas: one living tree, many years, nothing thrown away in January. It just needs a little looking after. Here's how.
First: start with healthy roots
A tree only survives if its roots do. Some trees are dug up from a field and squeezed into a pot for the season, losing most of their roots on the way - they rarely make it through their first summer. Ours are grown in their pots from the start, so the root system is whole and healthy, which is what makes keeping them for years genuinely realistic.
Indoors: keep the visit short
Think of Christmas as a holiday for the tree, not a new home. Ten days to a fortnight indoors is ideal; three weeks is the sensible maximum. A centrally heated room in midwinter tells the tree it's spring, and you don't want it waking up.
- Place it in the coolest bright spot you have, away from radiators.
- Water little and often - the compost should stay just moist, never waterlogged. Sitting the pot on a saucer of gravel helps drainage.
- Skip the fake snow sprays; the needles need to breathe.
After Christmas: the gentle exit
Don't move it straight from a warm lounge to a frozen patio. Acclimatise it - a week somewhere cool and sheltered (a porch, garage with a window, or against a house wall) before it goes back to its outdoor spot.
Through the year
- Keep it watered through spring and summer - pots dry out far faster than ground soil. This is the number-one cause of lost trees.
- Re-pot into a container one size up every couple of years, with fresh peat-free compost.
- A little slow-release fertiliser in spring keeps the colour deep.
Planting it out
If you'd rather give it a permanent home, plant it out between autumn and early spring in a sunny, well-drained spot - remembering a Nordmann Fir is a forest tree that will eventually grow large. Water it well through its first summer.
Bringing it back inside next year
Hose it down gently, check for hitchhiking spiders, let it dry, and bring it in - ideally a few days later each year as it gets bigger and more set in its ways. Plenty of our customers are on Christmas number four or five with the same tree. That's the whole idea.