Recycle it at the dump? Fine, apart from the petrol I suppose. Turn it into a perch for your garden birds? Well, I suppose it'll do until the last of the needles have dropped off?
Use the needles as a pine scent diffuser to make your house smell nice? Well, I suppose it'll make the place smell like a certain brand of disinfectant for a while, but fair enough. Plant the poor dying thing into the ground so that it'll be ready to re-use next Christmas? Not a bad idea, except that the BBC forgets to tell you to check that your tree actually has some roots.
![Neutral :|](./images/smilies/icon_neutral.gif)
And finally, eat your tree. Turn it into spruce custard and freeze it. Scrummy. Oh, but only if it's an organic or FSC-certified tree which won't have a poisonous coating of conservatives. (No, maybe they didn't actually use that word.) And do make sure that your spruce isn't a yew tree, because you might have bought one by mistake, you silly billy, and that might be an error that you won't live to regret.
So, now, where did I put my receipt? Hmmm, spruce, fir or poisonous yew? Oh dear, I know one of them has red berries, but hmmm, I just can't remember which one? And when the barrow boy down at the Saturday market said FSC, was he talking about the tree, or did he mean For Suckers at Christmas? (Or something worse?)
We chop the branches off our trees and use them as winter ground cover for tender plants. The sawn-up trunks go onto the rotting log pile in the bushes that we keep for the hedgehogs. What do you do with yours?
BJ