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9 Things To Do With Your Christmas Tree After the 25th

killingsworth_christmas_tree

The holidays are over and your Christmas tree has delightfully served its purpose. So now what?

Instead of kicking your Christmas tree to the curb, why not re-purpose it for something great?! Here are ten ways you can repurpose your Christmas tree after the holidays.

What To Do With Your Christmas Tree After Christmas:

1. Mulch Your Yard

The most common of ways to re-purpose your Christmas tree. You can actually turn your tree into mulch for your yard or garden. Start by cutting the branches off of your tree and then remove the pine needles from your branches.

Set the pine needles aside and use a wood chipper to chop the branches into small pieces. Wood chips can be used on all types of landscape to suppress pesky plants and weeds while pine needles, being full of nutrients, can be used to enhance the pH of your soil.

(Spring is just around the corner, why not set your yard up for success?)

2. Have a Bonfire

Evergreens are extremely sap-heavy trees, making them great for firewood. Being that it’s so flammable, sap burns hot and fast so it’s best if used for outdoor firewood. Using this wood in your home can create somewhat of a fire hazard for your home, so be careful to make sure your Cchristmas tree wood doesn’t mix in with your furnace wood.

3. Replant Your Tree

With Christmas just ending, you probably aren’t thinking about next Christmas just yet. But–if your tree is still alive and has been properly watered all season, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to replant it and use it next Christmas too! You can even place a bird feeder on it and make your tree a nice wildlife habitat.

4. Create Pathways

Create pathways to your home or shed using the trunk of your Christmas tree. Cut your tree trunk into slices and use it as stepping stones or, create path markers along existing paths!

You can even get creative and paint the tree trunks white to help you find your way at night.

5. Replenish Your Garden

If you opted to use your tree as firewood, you can repurpose it again and use the ashes from your bonfire. After you’ve finished burning the wood, take the ashes from the pit and spread them on your garden. The ashes contain potassium, lime and other nutrients that help plants grow and thrive. Make sure you use the ash from wood, not coal.

Bonus: Ashes also help to prevent insects from snacking on your plants!

6. Insulate Your Garden

The branches from your tree can be used in your garden to help with proper insulation. Cut the branches from the tree and simply lay them in your garden. The boughs will protect your plants from really cold weather and really warm weather. This gives plants a steady temperature no matter what the season. The limbs from your tree can also border your garden as garden edges.

7. Arts and Crafts

For the Pinterest lovers, there’s nothing you can’t do when it comes to arts and crafts with tree wood! Make some wooden ornaments for next year by using a saw to cut thin wooden slices out of your tree trunk, then decorate them however you’d like. You can also use this method to create wooden drink coasters.

Some other options include, but are not limited to, branch candlesticks, tealight logs, wood slice clocks and much more. Let you inner craftsman out by re-purposing your tree for arts and crafts!

8. Give Back

Christmas trees are a valuable renewable source, and there are organizations all over the country that want yours post-Christmas season. This is a little thing we like to call “tree-cycling”. Christmas trees submerged in a pond create a wonderful habitat for fish and water creatures. The weight of the tree keeps it anchored to the bottom and fish are able to feed off of it and live in it.

Christmas trees can also be used to restore coastal dunes and stream banks. You can even donate it to your local zoo! It turns out tigers really love playing with Christmas trees–who knew?

9. Return Your Tree

Depending on where you purchased your Christmas tree, many farms will actually take the tree back post Christmas! The tree decomposes naturally and the nutrients from the tree can be used to fertilize the soil for next year’s trees.

Let the season of giving live on by doing something different with your old Christmas tree this year. There’s an option for everyone!

Many of the things we mentioned have to do with recycling or reusing your tree to help maintain your yard and garden. As experts in lawn care, we love hearing about new, eco-friendly ways to care for our lawns. Our lawn care team would love to help you and your lawn. Schedule a lawn service with us today!

9 Things To Do With Your Christmas Tree After the 25th

Bedbug inspection

How to Know if Your Hotel Has Bedbugs

Upon entering a hotel room, do you typically reach for the tiny toiletries, take a leap onto the bed, or perhaps start by inspecting for bed bugs? Knowing what to look for is essential. Anticimex Carolinas Service Manager Christian Tweed has shared valuable insights on identifying bed bugs in your hotel room and preventing them from hitching a ride back home with you. And if bed bugs do become an unexpected part of your vacation, remember that Clark’s Pest Control is here to assist!



Q&A with a Pest Professional


How do bed bugs get inside hotels?


Bed bugs are primarily hitchhiking insects as opposed to foraging ones, meaning that they get carried around on people’s clothes and belongings. Someone with an active infestation in their home can easily bring bed bugs to their hotel, but they can also be picked up during travel (airplanes, taxis, and rideshare services) and brought to a hotel room.


What do people misunderstand about bed bugs in hotels?


From a probability standpoint, all hotels will deal with bed bugs at some point in time. If you think about a bed bug’s method of travel, there’s literally nothing a hotel can do to stop them from being carried in. What I have realized is that luxury hotels are more likely to have an aggressive response to dealing with a bed bug case once it’s identified as they tend to have a higher quality of service and a reputation to protect. While this isn’t always the case, it has been my experience more often than not.

Got bedbugs? Call Clark’s at 866-781-4991 today!

What do you recommend travelers do when they get to their room to check for bed bugs?


Most hotel headboards hang directly on the wall. I start my inspection here before even looking at the bed itself. I have found bed bugs, their exoskeletons, and the telltale black stains they leave behind around the edges of or in the crevices of headboards. If the headboard looks clean, move on to looking over the pillowcases and comforter for any signs or stains. You can dig into the bedding as deep as you want here, but I encourage people to look over the top layer of things at the very least.


What are some lesser-known signs of bed bugs in your hotel room?


The specifics of the black stains they leave behind, which as gross as it sounds, are just digested blood as that’s all that bed bugs feed on. If the stains are on a hard surface, they will be small dots as if left behind by an ink pen and will smear into a brownish gray when moisture is applied. If they’re on fabric, they will usually bleed along the fibers making a small diamond, square or X shape.


If there are bed bugs in your hotel room, can they travel home with you?


They absolutely can, however this is easy to prevent. While staying in a hotel, keep as much of your clothing and luggage off the beds as possible. Storing suitcases in the bathroom might sound odd, but it’s an effective method of prevention.

Don’t tackle bedbugs yourself, call Clark’s at 866-781-4991!

What should you do with your suitcase if you suspect your hotel has bed bugs?


When arriving home from a trip, leave your luggage in the garage or on a porch and bring your clothes in one load of laundry at a time. If the clothes are dirty, wash them like you normally would, if they’re clean then run them through the dryer for at least forty-five minutes. Once your suitcase is empty, vacuum over it meticulously (don’t forget to empty the vacuum when you’re done), or if you’re in the right climate, expose it to heat for a few days by placing it in your vehicle (parked in the sun) or for a few weeks in your attic.


The Clark’s Solution


If you brought bed bugs back to you home, Clark’s is here to help. Our Bedbug Control service is designed to eliminate bedbugs and create a safe, comfortable environment.


A Clark’s Pest Professional will do an inspection and recommend a plan of attack to get rid of bed bugs now and prevent them from hatching in the future. Call Clark’s at 866-781-4991 today for more information.




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