treedates

The tree farms near you, with this season's signs up

Cut-your-own and choose-your-own Christmas tree farms, checked against each farm's own website for the 2026 season: when they open, what's growing, whether you need a reservation — and, once the season starts, who still has trees.

Open this weekend

Every farm we've read, state by state

329 farms across 16 states · 318 of them with a page of their own, each read on the farm's own website

How TreeDates works

Every fall we read each farm's own website and social pages and put up its sign: the opening day it posted, what it grows, cut-your-own or pre-cut, reservations or walk-in. A farm we couldn't confirm for 2026 says call ahead — we never dress up last year's hours as this year's.

Then, from the week of Thanksgiving through December 20, we re-check the big farms weekly. Farms sell out mid-December every year and nobody tracks it — that's the sign families actually need, so it's the one we keep current.

And before the drive, the question the calendar asks first: when to put up the Christmas tree, and how long a cut one stays fresh once it is home and standing in water.

Or skip the drive

The Scout troop in the church parking lot, the Optimist Club on the corner it has held since the 1950s — the pre-cut lots that set up in the same place every year, city by city, with where each one is and the window it ran last season. Lots post their dates in November; we never guess them.

Tree lots by city

And in January

Once the tree comes down, the question changes to who takes it away. Cities run this three different ways — the curb, a drop-off corral, or a treecycling program that hands the mulch back in spring — and the dates move every year. We read each city's own page and put up what it says, with the date we read it.

Before that comes the question of when the tree should come down at all, which tradition and the fire figures answer differently: when should you take down the Christmas tree?

How to get rid of your tree

And long before any of it, the acorns

Autumn is the other half of the year the trees decide for you. Some years the oaks crop so heavily that a driveway needs raking every weekend and the deer never leave the ridge; the next year the same trees give almost nothing. State wildlife agencies have counted that crop on fixed routes for decades — West Virginia since 1971 — and they publish what they counted. So we did with those surveys what we do with the farms: read each one, print what it says, and put the year beside it.

Is this a mast year?