You can pick up a Christmas tree at almost any garden centre or supermarket these days – but there’s something special about making a day of it, pulling on your wellies and going out into the field to choose your own and haul it home.

Family-run Stoke Goldington Christmas Trees based near Newport Pagnell, North Bucks, has been growing Christmas trees since 2001 – and there’s nothing they don’t know about how to find the perfect fir or spruce to festoon with tinsel. Stoke Lodge Farm has been a working mixed farm for 120 years and the present generation of the Letts family, Jenny and her husband Chris, decided to branch out into Christmas trees alongside arable and sheep farming. They started out by planting 4,000 trees then waited patiently for them to grow (full height trees can take between eight and ten years), before selling the first mature crop of 36 trees to friends and family back in 2006.

Word spread, and now they have a fully-fledged forest of 45,000 trees in the ground, ranging from tiny newly planted saplings to 15-footers. Talk about a growth strategy – the Christmas trees are now a major part of the farm’s income stream, attracting up to 9,000 visitors each year from as far afield as London and the Cotswolds.

The 20-acre plantation is a mix of Nordmann Fir and Norwegian Spruce, and the Letts’ teenage children help out on the Christmas tree cultivating too. George, 19, runs the team that nets up the trees ready to take home, and Ruby, 17, helps man the payments desk.

Turns out if you’re running an operation like this, a Christmas tree isn’t just for Christmas. Watering, fertilizing, weeding, mowing and pruning is required almost every month of the year, then the Norwegian spruce are sheared into their traditional triangular shape in late August, with a final shaping-up in the autumn ready for Christmas show-time.

Kids will love tramping through the muddy fields (dog on leads also allowed) looking for The One (posing in the festive selfie frame en route, of course), before the chosen specimen is chopped down by the team, bundled up in netting and taken to your car. There’s a bit of a party atmosphere down on the farm too with cheese toasties and a hot chocolate from the Good Times Café and assorted F&B pop-ups back at the farmyard.

You can also sample the family’s other sideline, The Fruity Farmer range of fruit-infused gins and liqueurs, plus cold-pressed rapeseed oil. Find it on sale in the farm shop alongside Christmas wreaths by local florist Ellie Rose Flowers and other festive paraphernalia (hey, don’t forget a tree stand). Then stock up on home-grown logs, kindling, holly and mistletoe before trundling home to deck the halls. Get set for a very merry Christmas – now all you have to do is find the perfect tree. Here’s Jenny’s guide on what to look for.

How to choose the perfect Christmas tree

You usually want a tree around 6ft tall, depending on your ceiling height. We have all shapes and sizes, but the biggest we sell – often for a barn conversion – go up to 14ft. Come along with an idea of the height you need and bring a tape measure!

The Nordmann Fir is currently the nation’s most popular Christmas tree because it’s slightly less prone to dropping its needles. They are slightly darker green with more spaced out branches, which means the decorations hang nicely.

The Norway Spruce is your traditional Christmas tree – it has a beautiful sharp triangular shape and it’s a slightly lighter green, with a beautiful smell. However it’s slightly more prone to dropping its needles and can be rather prickly.

Did you know you have to water your Christmas tree? It’s like any other house plant, so you must put it in a water-holding stand and top it up when the water-level drops. To stop your tree drying out, don’t put it next to a radiator or fire and turn off underfloor heating in its zone if you can. It makes a huge difference.

The most popular time to choose a tree is the first weekend of December, and it should last until way after Xmas if you look after it (and remember to water it!). Some of our customers put their tree in the garden after Christmas, and it’s often still thriving in March.

Buying a tree that’s been grown in a plantation is a sustainable way to buy your tree because we plant far more than one tree to replace every one that is cut down and you’re supporting a local business. Just remember to recycle it via collection from your local council.

Christmas trees encourage biodiversity. Earlier this year we took part in the Big Farmland Bird Count run by the Game Wildlife Conservation Trust. In just 30 mins we counted over 100 birds, including blackbirds, chaffinches, pheasant, starling, a red kite and a kestrel.

Stoke Goldington Christmas Trees is based at Stoke Lodge Farm, Purse Lane, Stoke Goldington, Newport Pagnell, MK16 8LW. It opens for the Christmas season on Sun 24 Nov from 9am-4pm, then on Fri-Sun from 29 Nov to 15 Dec and Sat 21 and Sun 22 Dec. (No access to the plantations after 3.45pm). Norway Spruce cost £7 per foot, and the Nordmann Firs are £9 per foot.

How to choose the perfect Christmas tree – by those who grow them

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