SALISBURY — For many, decorating for Christmas starts immediately after Thanksgiving, and for those who want a live tree, it’s important to know how to select and care for the tree.

Bryce Kepley, owner of Pinetop Farm, 830 Majolica Road, Salisbury, shared some tips about both the selection process and how to best keep the tree fresh during its time in your home.

Fullness, thickness and height are three criteria that Kepley said he looks for when choosing a tree.

He pointed out some of the trees on his farm, noting that even though they are small, “they’ve already been trimmed a little bit,” something that happens yearly until they get cut. This trimming process helps to shape them and make them thicker, he noted

Once cut, Kepley shared several things that need to be done to ensure the trees remain fresh for families to enjoy as long as possible.

No. 1 on his list of dos is to have a fresh cut on the trunk followed by putting the tree immediately into water. 

“That tree will sap up a lot of water and you won’t have any more water in your container,” Kepley said. Therefore, the key is keeping it in water constantly “even after you set it in your tree stand. Be sure you keep water in there. That’s the key thing to maintaining a fresh tree,” he emphasized.

Kepley said that if the water evaporates from the trunk, the area where it was cut “will get hard as a rock and it will not take up another drop of water” until you cut it again and it might require a longer cut than you made the first time.

Additional tips that will help your Christmas tree remain fresh in the home is keeping it away from heat sources.

“Always keep any tree away from heat,” he said. “The heat will not help to maintain appearance,” to which he added, “sun, wind and all the elements has an effect on how a tree looks.”

At the Pinetop Farm, multiple varieties of trees are available for purchase including Scotch Pine, White Pine, Blue Ice, Leyland Cypress and precut Fraser Fir, all of which are premium trees. And, just as the kinds of trees vary, so do the sizes that are offered, up to about 12 feet, he noted.

Prices vary as well according to the size. Kepley pointed out a Fraser fir, which is the most popular tree, costing $70 for a 6-7-foot tree, with the tallest at 11 feet. A white pine, which has also been sought-after, is $80 for a 6-7-foot tree, with the tallest also being 11 feet.

He said he could grow the pines at the farm, but not the Fraser firs, which come from the mountains.

When people come to the farm to select their tree, they can either select the precut ones or go to the field and choose their own and cut it down. Bow saws are available at the farm or Kepley said people can bring small power saws, but chainsaws are not permitted.

Those coming for the choose-and-cut trees must cut their own, but once they bring their tree back to the checkout area, Kepley said they provide multiple customer services including taking the tree to the shaker.

“We shake the trees to get all the debris and pine needles out,” after which it is taken to a machine that puts netting on it and then loads it on the vehicle, ready to take home.

Kepley has been in the Christmas tree farm business since about 1970, on land he inherited, he said.

During the time he was employed with NASA as an engineer, he was trying to decide what to do with the land. While many of his friends were headed to the beach, he would come to the farm on his vacations and work.

He started around that time in the ’70s and was wholesaling trees and then suffered a major fire, which burned all of his marketable trees, setting him back four years. Kepley then decided that was the time to make the transition to choose and cut, an idea he had been toying with previously.

After trees are cut down, replanting of saplings must take place to prepare for future Christmas trees. It takes about seven or eight years for a tree to be ready for harvesting.

When people visit the farm, Kepley said he would encourage the children to, first of all, have fun, and secondly to be careful and not run as there may be pieces of twine on the ground.

“We try to keep them picked up, monitored and take all the loose stuff up, but there could be one that gets by” and someone could get tangled up, he said. So he stresses that children should not run around.

After Christmas is over and the trees come down, watch for area locations that you could possibly recycle them and help yourself and the environment.