CHRISTMAS TREES
BRANCHING
OUT For the Ellis family, this time of year is exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. The family’s North Luffenham Christmas tree plantation is expected to see more than 5,000 excited families turn up over the next couple of weeks to secure their homes’ festive centrepiece. This month we ‘spruce’ ourselves up ready ‘fir’ Christmas in Rutland… Words: Rob Davis.
“WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP, our parents didn’t put their Christmas tree up until Christmas Eve,” says Gill. “They still wait until December 24th today!” The rest of us don’t. Most of Rutland, in fact, descend upon Gill’s family’s Christmas tree farm over the last weekend in November or at least the very first few days of December to choose, take home and decorate their tree. There are, in fact, about 20,000 households in Rutland, and if Digby Farm sells over 5,000 trees each year, we reckon that means roughly a quarter of people in the county take their tree home from the plantation; most by the beginning of December. That explains why Gill and the rest of her family are completely exhausted by the time Christmas rolls around. It was Gill’s grandfather who founded the farm as a mixed operation, yielding beef, cereals and so on. In 1986 though her parents, John and Helen Ellis, decided to focus exclusively on growing Christmas trees. They’re a long rotation crop so it wasn’t until some years later – about 1991 – that the family was able to sell their first trees, but soon locals began to return to the farm year after year for the annual ritual of choosing their festive centrepiece. “We sold them via wholesalers initially but gradually moved away from that because we found that we could provide a more personal service and fresher trees by selling direct to the public… and people were turning up at the farm keen to buy directly from us anyway, so we were happy to oblige.” “The farm covers about 150 acres in total and we’ve 70 acres of trees. They grow about a foot each year as a rule but we’ve several different varieties, each of which have slightly different characteristics.” >> 86
