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Christmas Tree Season—An End, A Beginning
The End of Christmas Tree Season is Just the Beginning
By Jim Hamilton
“Guess I can cut our own tree, now.”
It’s mid-December and the last gooseneck trailerful of six to eight-foot Fraser firs that were loaded before dawn has just left the farm, bound for a retail Christmas tree lot—120 miles away—that’s down to its last seven trees. David was expecting it. It’s late in the season, but the wholesale customer who just drove away in the Dodge dually hauling the trees runs one of the only tree lots in Greensboro that stays open until Christmas Eve. “You’d be surprised how many folks put their tree up that late,” David says as he grabs the rosin-caked Stihl from the bed of his truck and ambles into the middle of his field, all but empty of the sea of dark green that covered the hillside for the last ten years. He lifts the bottom branches of the lone triple-flagged tree in the field—the one his daughters picked out in August—to find a good place to start the cut, and in a few short seconds, the tree is being dragged to the truck over the slick, frozen orchard grass. His season is over. For now.
The eight temporary guestworkers who were brought to these mountains the first day of November from the sweet-potato fields in eastern Carolina wait in the van. Bulging luggage is stuffed into the rear compartment and they’re off to wait at the Wal-Mart for the tour bus contracted to take them and crews from other Christmas tree farms back to their hometowns in Mexico, from Vera Cruz to Michoacán. This scene repeats itself in box store parking lots across the mountain counties in early December as tree harvest ends.
The first round of workers typically show up in March. Guestworkers with H2A visas, mostly from rural Mexico, many of whom have worked on the same farm for twenty years, provide the hand skills to the industry that the local labor force simply can’t muster. “We couldn’t grow trees if we didn’t have ‘em,” says David…and Tracy and Carroll and Harry, and any other Christmas tree grower you ask. In order to get the roughly four million trees cut, dragged, baled, palleted, loaded, and hauled to the garden centers, Food Lions, Winn-Dixies, parking-lot retailers, and church fundraisers, the saws began humming before Halloween.
“Can we borrow the soil probe?”
Well before the last snows of winter, tree growers begin the prep work for the coming season. If the ground isn’t frozen, they’ll zig-zag between young trees, unlodging plugs of earth from coring tubes into a plastic bucket. Soil samples are boxed up and sent to the N.C. Department of Agriculture (NCDA) Agronomic lab in Raleigh to determine how much lime, or which blend of fertilizers, needs to be added to ensure proper growth and color. Sturdy branches, dark green needles, and strong roots—that’s what they’re shootin’ for. That, and the aroma of Christmas, is what the tree industry in western North Carolina is built around—producing the “Cadillac of Christmas Trees.”
Clear-cut fields are replanted with transplants, some of which come all the way from Oregon. In the 1950s, when growers didn’t have the luxury of directshipped transplants packed in convenient Styrofoam trays, the entrepreneurs who started the local industry took a winding gravel road to the top of Roan Mountain to pull transplants from the carpet of seedlings beneath native stands of Fraser fir to plant into cleared hillsides.
When the burlap sacks full of young trees arrive to his farm the first week in March, David sits on the cold steel seat of the transplanter, crisscrossing the rows from last year’s harvest to replant the field between the stumps. As the blade below his seat rips into the ground, David drops in a transplant, measuring in his head the spacing between each one. He’s rarely off an inch. He’ll repeat this step 7,000 times over the course of the next two days.
The newly transplanted trees are a foot and a half tall and already four years old, and they’ll put on roughly a foot of growth each year. This is the long game of the tree industry. David won’t see a dime from these trees for seven years or more. But he’ll spend plenty. While Fraser fir likes the acidic soils of the mountain slopes, if the ground’s too “sour,” the other nutrients in the soil may not be as available to the plant, causing yellow or stunted needles.
Damn sure can’t have that. The spring crews will load up back-pack applicators of urea, triple super phosphate, or 18-46-0, spreading handfuls of pellets around each tree.
By July, if the amendments to the soil have done their trick, the trees will be ready for their annual pruning. Each tree is groomed with a two-foot long shearing knife, wielded by crews of men who circle every single tree, counterclockwise to avoid slicing open their knees, tipping each branch a few inches to even out the shape into a pyramid. Workers carry pruningclippers in their back pockets to remove the “horns” or extra tops that sometime spring from the crown of the tree. Only the strongest top with the best bud set is left to keep the tree growing upward. If the crows haven’t bent them over in the late spring when growth is tender, the tree will put on another foot or so of height.
The trees are also scouted for pests and disease. Some that don’t roll so easily off the tongue include phytophthora, balsam wooly adelgid, and elongate hemlock scale. While problem spots of insect pests can be controlled with a good soaking from the blast of a high-pressure sprayer, phytophthora can’t. That one lives in the soil, and once it’s in a field, it takes the trees out by the root, turning the entire tree rusty red and dead in as little as one growing season. Then there are the weeds. By late summer, if the field isn’t sprayed or mowed, it’s a jungle in there. Horseweed, poke, orchard grass, and Queen Anne’s lace can get so high you won’t see the fawn (or the yellowjacket nest) hiding in there unless you step on it.
By September, if David is caught up on shearing, he’ll begin yet another trip through the field, grading and tagging the ones to cut this year based on height and quality. He points to a block of trees that still have a year before receiving his blessing: “Those over there were late gettin’ their haircut.” His best trees, the premiums, get their first Christmas ornament—a footlong swath of blue flagging tape.
“Try back in a couple years.”
On his cell, David nods through the howdy-dos with a garden center manager from Port St. Lucie, FL. “I’m already sold out for next year,” he says, finishing the call. After hanging up, he confesses that he’s actually sold out for the next three years by his estimations. While Christmas trees are planted and eventually sold on the scale of other commercial crops every year, the production cycles of Fraser fir are decadeslong endeavors. Growers have to navigate the dance steps of a macroeconomic tango that can last for decades.
In the early 2000s, millions of new transplants went into the ground. Too many. A trend of upward pricing from the decade before spurred on a collective mass-planting in the mountains. Just as those trees came ‘online’ and ready for harvest, the bottom dropped out of the market. The glut of trees ready to be cut and the housing market collapse at the end of 2008 began to fry the entire motherboard of the tree industry. By the 2010 season, it was extra crispy. Tree prices plummeted as tighter wallets from the recession further depressed demand. Some growers left the industry, never looking back. At the same time, the seedling growers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Oregon had no market for the millions of their seedlings ready to ship out to farms. The days of speculative planting, from tree and seedling growers alike, ended. Fast forward to the present, and that ‘shortage’ of seedlings has turned the supply and demand cycle back on its head.
David’s phone rings again. He recognizes the number. Another large retail lot looking for more trees. He doesn’t pick up. “Wish I had another 100,000 ready to go. They’ve been calling since last year.”
Dr. Jim Hamilton is the Watauga County Extension Director and author of The Last Entry, a coming of age novel set under the backdrop of the ginseng trade.
Photos courtesy of The North Carolina Christmas Tree Association.
