How to Keep a Real Tree Alive Past the First Week

Our first real tree was a disaster and I’m not going to lie, I blamed the tree. We’d just moved to Florida, I was so excited to finally have a real one, and by day eight it was dropping needles every time the air kicked on. I had watered it! I had watered it a lot! I stood there sweeping up needles in December in Florida thinking I had just gotten a bad tree.

I did not get a bad tree. I got a tree with a trunk that had sealed itself shut before it ever touched water, and I didn’t find that out until the following year when I finally sat down and read everything I could find about how these things actually drink. So here’s what I’ve learned, in the order you’ll need it, so your tree makes it well past that first week!

1. Make a fresh cut before it goes in the stand

This is the whole thing. This is the one that changed everything for me!

When a tree gets cut at the farm, the trunk starts sealing over with sap almost immediately. Within a few hours that cut end is basically closed, and a closed trunk cannot pull water up no matter how full your stand is. So if your tree was cut a week ago (or three weeks ago, which is very possible with a lot tree), you have to open it back up.

Take a half inch off the bottom of the trunk, straight across, right before it goes in the stand. Not at an angle, not a V shape, and please don’t drill a hole in the bottom — I saw that tip somewhere and it does nothing except make the trunk sit weird. Straight across, half an inch, done!

Most tree lots will do this for you for free if you ask, and you should absolutely ask! But you need to get it in water within a couple of hours of that cut, and if the drive home is long or you’re not setting it up until the next day, do it yourself in the driveway. I keep a Corona RazorTOOTH folding pruning saw in the garage for exactly this. It folds up, it goes through a fresh trunk in about thirty seconds, and it’s under twenty-five dollars. A regular handsaw works too — it just takes longer and you’ll be sweating.

2. Get a stand with a reservoir that actually holds something

Here’s the number that made me rethink everything: a real tree drinks roughly a quart of water a day for every inch of trunk diameter. So a tree with a four inch trunk can go through a full gallon in a day, and it drinks the most during that first week when it’s still recovering from being cut.

Now go look at the stand you have. Mine held maybe a quart total! It was running dry every single night while I was asleep, and every time it ran dry the trunk started sealing over again. It didn’t matter that I was refilling it every morning — the damage happened overnight.

I switched to the Krinner Christmas Tree Genie XXL Deluxe and it is the single most expensive Christmas thing I own, so let me be honest about that up front. It’s not a cheap stand. But it holds two and a half gallons, it has a water level indicator so I’m not guessing, and it sets up with a foot pedal — you hold the tree straight, step on the pedal a few times, and five cables tighten around the trunk evenly. No lying on the floor while someone yells “left, LEFT.”

If that’s not in the budget this year (completely fair), the rule still holds: whatever stand you use, it needs to hold at least a gallon. That’s the part that matters!

3. Plain water. That’s it.

I have tried the aspirin. I have tried the sugar. I have tried the lemon-lime soda thing that everyone’s aunt swears by. I even tried a little packet of “tree preservative” that came free with a tree one year.

None of it did anything my tap water wasn’t already doing. Save your money and your counter space and just use plain water. The tree doesn’t need a smoothie, it needs volume and consistency.

4. A watering funnel, so you stop crawling under the tree

Okay, this is my favorite thing on this entire list and it costs about ten dollars.

Every night for two seasons I got down on the floor in my pajamas, army-crawled halfway under the branches with a pitcher, and poured water at a stand I couldn’t see. I sloshed it on the tree skirt constantly. I got sap in my hair. Once I knocked an ornament off with my shoulder and broke it, and it was one of the good ones.

A tree watering funnel is just a long tube with a wide funnel on top. You tuck the tube down into the stand once at setup, hook the funnel over a branch near the back of the tree, and from then on you water your tree standing up, in about four seconds, from a pitcher. That’s the entire product! It’s so simple and it changed my whole nightly routine.

There’s also this Santa’s Helper watering spout if you want something that hides a little better in the branches. Either one — just get one! And hide it toward the back of the tree where the wall side is, because it’s not the cutest object in the room.

5. Where not to put it (this one is free)

You can do everything above perfectly and still lose the tree in ten days if you park it in the wrong spot. Warm moving air pulls moisture out of the needles faster than the trunk can push it back up, and here in Florida the heat runs in weird bursts that dry everything out.

So: not directly over a floor vent, not next to the fireplace, not in front of a big south-facing window that gets sun all afternoon. If your only good tree spot happens to sit on a vent (mine did the year we rented), close that one vent for December. One closed vent is not going to change your whole house, I promise!

And use LED lights. They stay cool, and warm bulbs sitting against the needles for six hours a night is just a slow blow dryer.

6. Strap it, because trees fall over

A well-watered tree in a two-gallon stand is heavy and top-heavy, and I have a small daughter who was, at one point, extremely interested in the bottom third of the tree.

I use TipNot no-drill anti-tip straps — they’re adhesive, so no holes in a rental wall, and you loop them around the stand legs. If you have a corner, you can also run clear fishing line from the trunk to two small hooks in the wall and nobody will ever see it. Either way, do something, y’all! Cleaning two gallons of water and a whole tree out of a living room is not how you want to spend a Tuesday.

7. Buy the removal bag now, not in January

Nobody thinks about this in December and then everybody regrets it in January. Dragging a dry tree back through your house is how you get needles in the carpet until March.

Get a tree disposal and storage bag at the beginning of the season and slide it over the stand before you ever put the tree in. It sits under the skirt all December where you’ll never see it, and when it’s time, you pull it up over the tree and carry the whole mess out sealed. Ten minutes instead of an hour of vacuuming!

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That’s it! Fresh cut, big reservoir, plain water every day, and keep it away from the heat. My trees make it a solid five to six weeks now, which means I can put it up when I want to (early — always early) instead of counting backward from Christmas and hoping.

If you get a real tree this year, post it on instagram and tag me @sugardesignco — I want to see it, needles and all!

-Ciera

Made something with this? Tag me @sugardesignco — I love seeing them.