By rdnewsNOW staff

HOLIDAY CRAFT SHOW AND MARKET

Fresh-cut Christmas trees for conservation

Nov 27, 2019 | 5:54 AM

RED DEER- The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is inviting supporters in the Red Deer area to the Christmas Holiday Craft Show and Market on December 7 to take home a fresh-cut holiday tree.

The Christmas Holiday Craft Show and Market is free for the public to attend and runs from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. at the Baymont Inns and Suites Red Deer (former Red Deer Lodge).

The event will feature local vendors, kids crafts and gift card draws.

NCC staff will host an outdoor booth from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. and will have a limited number of blue spruce trees available for pick up by donation.

Come out early to avoid disappointment.

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On December 6, NCC staff and Conservation Volunteers will be removing these trees from the Haynes property near Pine Lake.

When NCC acquired this property in 2011, it also inherited a tree farm full of white and blue spruce.

While white spruce is indigenous to the area, the Colorado blue spruce is not, in fact, nowhere in Canada is this tree native, so NCC’s naturalization plan has targeted them for removal.

Instead of cutting down all the blue spruce trees at once, NCC plans to gradually remove these trees over the next decade to give the native species more room to grow and create a more natural, staggered forest than the evenly spaced rows of the tree farm.

Once all of the blue spruce have been removed from this conservation site, NCC plans to diversify the forest by planting native shrubs, aspen and balsam poplar trees.

NCC has been actively working in the Red Deer River area for more than a decade.

To date, they have helped conserve 9,700 acres (3,900 hectares) in the area which contains the highest density of intact parkland in central Alberta.