Winter provides a great opportunity to decorate your home and landscape with natural elements. Bringing some of the outdoors in can fill your space with fragrance and a festive appearance. You can string up balsam garlands, adorn the door with a cedar wreath and put lights and ornaments on a holiday tree.
If you're in the market for a live holiday tree, Vermont and New Hampshire are graced with hundreds of Christmas tree farms, with trees planted in neat rows for choosing just the right one.
And if you'd prefer, you can even cut down your own tree from the Green Mountain National Forest.
If you're purchasing a pre-cut holiday tree, before you strap it to your car and drive off, make sure that it is as fresh as it can be. Hold the tree by its trunk and bang it on the ground a few times. If it loses lots of needles, choose another.
Once home, recut the base of the trunk, then get your live tree into water soon. And for a day or two, keep it in a cool room so it can acclimate to your home. This should help the tree last throughout the holidays and beyond.
And while you're putting up holiday decorations, incorporate other greenery! Balsam and Fraser firs are beautiful and have that great holiday scent — but other options can add a festive look while bringing different textures and scents, like white spruce, white fir, spruce and white and Scotch pines.
And holiday decorations needn't stop at a wreath or tree. You can create one-of-a-kind swags — those are bundles of greenery that you can place on a tabletop or a mantle. And get kids and grandkids involved in the DIY-ing by bundling them up and sending them outdoors to gather up some interesting natural elements!
They can take trimmings from evergreens in your yard, or if you've got a live holiday tree and need to limb it up to even out its appearance, use those branches for your swags.
Then head outdoors to gather seed pods, pine cones or interesting bare branches and dried berries. Cuttings from other trees and shrubs in your yard — like white cedar, arborvitae, juniper and boxwood — look great, too. When putting together the swag, begin by tying together a base of greens then add on your backyard treasures.
What is making holes in linden tree?
Q: We planted a native, littleleaf linden in our front yard about eight or nine years ago. It’s about 15 feet tall. We noticed two holes at the base of the trunk about 1/4-inch wide. One seemed to be “weeping” a dark stain. Is this from the linden borer beetle, and if so is there anything we can do about it? The tree has sentimental value, as well as one of our favorite trees for its late-blooming, delicate and fragrant flowers. And it’s just reached a good height as a shade tree. - Jean Elizabeth, via email
A: Some other borers came to mind, but Margaret Skinner, an entomologist at the University of Vermont Extension, looked at the photo and confirmed that the damage most likely is from the linden borer.
Skinner suggested that, because the linden borer insect larvae overwinter in those holes and tree trunk galleries, you can mitigate them for next year. Get a flexible wire, stick it into those holes and wiggle it around a bunch, and that can kill the larvae.
Then see how the tree fares next year. And keep a watch for more borers. As soon as you see those holes, use the flexible wire and that should help out.
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