i currently grow corn, milo, and soybeans , alternating years . i would like to grow xmas , decortive and shade trees for resale on this ground . i have tried sweet corn and it did well , but the labor involved is to much for me , i'm 59 .
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Hello, depending on what type of “christmas trees” you are planting, you should be able to plant the new trees about 10 feet apart in rows about 10 feet apart. This gives more than ample room for the trees to grow, again assuming they are going to be some type of evergreen tree that may only get about 6 to 10 years old. Some evergreens used for christmas tree farms for example blue spruce or douglas fir, grow maybe about 1 to 2 feet per year. You can purchase some of these on ebay, I don’t sell them but shoot me an email and I can give you the sellers name from Ebay. So you can basically count on about 435 roughly per acre. Keep in mind you’re going to also have to have a watering system in place, you could obtain soaker hoses but for 10 acres it will be alot of hose, possibly could use the smaller hoses with nozzles on them(I would recommend). Planting all 10 acres is a possibility at one time, but at the end of harvest you probably would need at least 2 acres for the next harvest time, just like the other answer stated. Best of luck.
Added Info: If you are looking for resale of shade trees and decorative trees as well. You could use the same amount of spacing , just keep in mind that shade trees and decorative trees grow at a much faster rate than “christmas trees” per say. A good evergreen to plant for resale would be the thuja green giant, they grow approximately 3 to 5 feet per year and are similar to leyland cypress but in my opinion are much better than Leyalnd cypress. Green giants do not get the fungus that easily spreads among Leylands. With the green giants (I have 128 of them around my property line) just be sure to mulch them in, especially if going to be selling, this will keep root system moist and develops rather quickly. I have my green giants planted 6 foot apart (center to center) for privacy screen, rather nice looking, lol. but for resale, you can have rotating stock on a yearly basis if wanted too with this particular type of tree. So to sum it up I would plant on a 10X10 spacing, the trees would have plenty of room to grow and you also have room for tractor, or customers vehicles to come dig up or cut trees.
I would plant 2 acres per year, 50 trees per acre. Then, after 5 years you have all 10 acres planted and they are staggered so you only harvest 20% of them per year.