In this paper, we study the area requirements of planar straight-line orthogonal drawings of ternary trees. We prove that every ternary tree admits such a drawing in sub-quadratic area. Further, we present upper bounds, the outcomes of an experimental evaluation, and a conjecture on the area requirements of planar straight-line orthogonal drawings of complete ternary trees. Finally, we present a polynomial lower bound on the length of the minimum side of any planar straight-line orthogonal drawing of a complete ternary tree.