Christmas is better without pricks.
A team of Canadian researchers hopes its work will help Christmas trees retain their needles and keep the needles from falling onto floors where they cause millions of unwanted foot pricks each year during the festive season.
The researchers believe they have found the source of dropped prickles.“Post harvest needle abscission is a major challenge for Christmas tree and greenhouse industries,” dryly notes the paper in the journal Trees in which researchers from the Nova Scotia Agricultural College and the University of Laval in Quebec lay out their findings.
“Post harvest needle drop poses a major threat to the Christmas tree industry.”
There are perhaps those who consider Christmas tree horticulture to be a fringe industry, but the researchers point out that it is a worldwide market of $1.85 billion and that 65 percent of Canada’s six million harvested Christmas trees are exported to places like the United States and the Caribbean.
However, because of pressure to cut and ship the trees early, the beginning of October in some cases, many trees are not good a keeping their needles or at facing cold weather.
The researchers estimate that one-third of exported Canadian balsam fir trees lose all of their needles within three weeks of cutting, which equals the time many are in transit.
That makes them useless as festive props and causes about one million per year to be junked.The researchers found that adding ethylene inhibitors to block the action of exogenous ethylene reduced needle losses by 147 percent where ethylene was measureable in the tree, and by 73 percent where it was not.
“Ethylene is strongly implicated as the signal triggering abscission in root-detached balsam fir,” said the report.
The researchers hope by adding ethylene inhibitors Christmas tree producers and marketers could preserve a far greater amount of the harvested trees.
