Learn About Connecticut's Christmas Tree Business

Many Tree Farms Opening Earlier in Season to Meet Demand 

The Moro family had no idea that the Christmas tree they chose at Broken Arrow Nursery last week was a Veitch Fir, an exotic Japanese species known for its eye-catching combination of deep green and silver needles.

“It has two colors and it looks like it has snow on it,” Osbaldo Moro said moments after felling the tree with a bow saw at the Evergreen Avenue farm. “I saw it and said this is the perfect one.”

Farm owner Dick Jaynes, a retired horticulturalist at the nearby Connecticut Agricultural Station, enjoys growing and offering several exotic fir species, along with the more traditional Fraser and Balsam Fir, White and Blue Spruce and White Pine.

But when it comes to what makes a customer choose a certain tree, he says it’s not the name that counts. Even if customers arrive with a type in mind, he said, they are just as apt to switch as soon as they see one that appeals to their eye, regardless of species.

“The type really doesn’t matter,” Dick said on a recent cold, blustery afternoon that followed two days of welcome rain. “The trees that sell are the ones that look good and are 7 to 8 feet tall.”

With his son Burton, he grows about 25 acres of Christmas trees in two locations in town.

The farm typically sells more than 2,000 trees a season, including their specialty exotics such as Nikko, Veitch, Korean, King Boris, and Veitch/Balsam hybrids.  

The Jaynes are members of the Connecticut Christmas Tree Growers’ Association and their farm is one of more than 500 Christmas tree growers in the state, most of which are much smaller or hobby operations.

Business has been “crazy” since they opened last month, reflecting what Dick calls the biggest change in the industry that he has seen over the decades.

“People keep buying trees earlier and earlier,” he said. “You have to be in the starting blocks and ready to go.”

Burton, a chemist who ended his pharmaceutical career about ten years ago to join his father at the nursery, said the early-buying trend has prompted them to start selling trees weeks earlier than they used to.

“Fifteen years ago we didn’t even open Thanksgiving weekend,” he said. “Now we open the weekend before Thanksgiving.”

Dick’s roots in the Christmas tree business date to 1947, when as an 11-year-old he planted a couple hundred spruce seedlings he’d won as a prize in a 4-H poultry project supervised by his father, Harold.

“We put these Norway spruce seedlings around an apple orchard my father had planted,” Jaynes recalled. “They did pretty well, so we got a few more and pretty soon we started cutting down apple trees.”

By the mid-1960s the orchard had been fully converted to an evergreen farm. Dick, a Yale graduate who chiefly worked with Mountain Laurel and Chestnut trees during 25 years at the Agricultural Experiment Station, retired in 1984 to open Broken Arrow Nursery, known for its year-round propagation of unusual garden plants.  

Earlier this year, the Jaynes built a new barn/retail shop with the help of a matching Farm Reinvestment Grant from the state Department of Agriculture. 

That extra space proved unexpectedly crucial this season, when their old barn located just a few dozen feet away was heavily damaged in a mid-November fire that started in a wood stove.   

The new barn is where customers pay for their tree, and also serves as a workspace where the farm’s holiday wreaths are made, strictly with materials grown on the premises. On the walls of the barn hangs a collection of tree stands spanning back to the early 1900s.

Many of the oldest ones don’t even include a reservoir for water, because in those days trees were commonly put up only in the week or so before Christmas.

“I grew up in a house where we didn’t see the tree until Christmas morning,” Dick said with a hint of amazement.

But because so many families now buy their tree around Thanksgiving, growers have adapted by offering species that can survive a month or more indoors.

“We’ve had to grow more firs because they last longer,” Dick said.

Trees are started as 2-year-old seedlings, or “plugs,” purchased from a greenhouse company.

Although yearly planting traditionally began in May, Dick said that date has gradually been moved up to early April in hopes the roots will set before warmer temperatures prompt the top of the plant to sprout buds.

“We start as soon as the ground thaws,” he said. “With global warming, the earlier the better.”

The farm lost a significant amount of Balsam Fir seedlings this year due to the long-running drought.

Dick’s penchant for research leads him to be on the constant lookout for “another species that will be better than what we have.”

His attention and that of many others in the industry has lately turned to the Turkish Fir, which tolerates dry soil and appears to be quite resistant to the bane of all evergreen growers – Phytophthora Root Rot that thrives in wet soil.

Research on the tree is being conducted at the state Agricultural Experiment Station, as well as at the state universities in Washington and North Carolina.

“It’s resistant to disease in wet soils,” Dick said, “but it’s slow-growing,” taking up to 10 years to reach market height rather than the more typical seven.

With the solid demand for trees and the closing of several tree farms in the area in recent years, Dick believes that New Haven and Fairfield Counties actually have a shortage of live-tree options for customers.

He fears that could force potential buyers to default to what he calls “the dark side.”

“They might get an artificial tree,” he said with a sly grin. “And we don’t want that to happen. We need more growers.”

A listing and brochure of tree farms that belong to the Connecticut Christmas Tree Growers Assoc. can be found at http://www.ctchristmastree.org/ or the Dept. of Agriculture’s website: CTGrown.gov

 

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Submitted by Ridgefield, CT

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