Around seven million Christmas trees are sold in NRW every year. Increasingly, buyers are felling the trees themselves or buying them directly from the growers. Now this year's season has started.
Rheurdt (dpa/lnw) - With constant prices of 21 to 27 euros per meter of Nordmann fir, this year's Christmas tree season in North Rhine-Westphalia officially began on Thursday. "We hope that consumers will decorate their homes with greenery for Christmas again, despite inflation," said Eberhard Hennecke from the State Horticulture Association of North Rhine-Westphalia at an appointment at a cultivation company in Rheurdt on the Lower Rhine. According to the association, around seven million Christmas trees are sold in NRW every year. The federal state is one of the largest growing areas in Europe.
The cultivation year went well for the producers despite the hot and dry periods, said Hennecke, who heads the Christmas tree growers group in the association. In Rheurdt, this year's Christmas tree queen, Sophia Adlberger from Upper Bavaria, symbolically knocked down a tree.
Customers are increasingly cutting down their trees on farms themselves, or at least picking them up there. About a quarter of the trees in North Rhine-Westphalia are now marketed in this way directly and regionally without long transport routes, the association said. Nationwide, 23 to 25 million Christmas trees are sold in Germany every year. According to the association, the most popular is the Nordmann fir, followed by the blue spruce and Nobilis.
