ROCHESTER, Wash. — Ever wonder here baby Christmas Trees come from? Every year, 45 million trees get their start at Weyerhaeuser's Rochester Tree Nursery. About 5 million of these are future Christmas Trees.
Auriel Day, nursery site leader, explains the 'Fir Tree Facts of Life' as she shows us one of the fir seed orchards on this site.
"This orchard is one of our newer established ones, it's seven years old, we expect a cone crop hopefully within the next five years," she said.
Trees make both male and female cones. Male cones make pollen, then female cones make seeds. Then workers at the nursery harvest the cones by hand.
"Those cones get collected into bushel bags and sent to our seed processing plant where a lot of steps go into getting down to that little seed, to produce millions of Christmas trees," Day said.
Each seed gets shaken and sorted in a contraption that gets rid of excess material and chaff. "Pure live seed is what we're looking for," explained seed plant manager Viviana Olivares holding a handful of seeds - future trees.
Then the seeds get a nice, long bath. "They go through a water bath for 24 hours then they're removed and taken out to a cooler, this is important for germination," Olivares explained
Day pointed out one jug full of soaking seeds: "Here we have noble fir seed, in about 10 years you'll have your Christmas tree to take home and enjoy in the comfort of your living room."
The seeds are nurtured into tiny trees at the nursery. And they aren't just destined for your living room.
"This is a one year Douglas fir seedling," said Day, holding a 7 inch tall light green seedling. "We'll ship it out this year and it will be in it's forever home when it wakes up."
More than 130 million seedlings a year get planted in the wild - reforestation to replace trees that have been harvested. Part of the Pacific Northwest's circle of life, whether these little green babies grow up to be Christmas trees - or future forests.
"I love what I do coming in and you just you feel like you have this bigger purpose." said Day. "Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I just feel like I took a lot of it for granted for a long time. And now I get to be part of making sure that we have forests for generations to come."
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