Conservancy offering blue spruce trees for Christmas
The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is inviting our valued neighbours, partners, and supporters in the Red Deer area to join us for our third annual open house at the Glenellen Community Centre to celebrate the holidays.
On Saturday, December 8, the community is invited to stop in for a hot chocolate, apple cider, and other seasonal treats from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. A limited number of beautiful pre-cut blue spruce trees will be available for attendees to take home for use as a holiday tree.
On December 7, NCC staff and Conservation Volunteers will be removing these trees from the Haynes property near Pine Lake. When NCC acquired the Haynes 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.