By Clint Thompson
Consumers are purchasing live Christmas trees earlier than ever before. It started the weekend before Thanksgiving this year. That’s good news for producers who are able to capitalize on an early market, said Steve Mannard, with Fish River Farms in Baldwin County, Alabama.
“Most of the farmers now open the weekend before Thanksgiving and we resisted that for years. But now we’re doing it, too. We sold a fair number of trees (that) weekend,” Mannard said. “It turns out a number of customers like to get their trees up for Thanksgiving as well as Christmas. It’s becoming now more of a Thanksgiving purchase rather than a Christmas purchase. Thanksgiving weekend was always busy, but now it’s busy, busy, busy.”
Mannard advises consumers about managing their live trees for more than a month. Proper precautions need to be taken if the tree is going to look as pretty on Christmas Day as it did on Thanksgiving.
“If they’re kept cool and moist, and out of the sun and the wind, they’re pretty good. When you put them in these hot houses, with the heat blowing across them, it’s like a hair dryer. That’s what dries these trees out,” Mannard said.
Mannard said weather events last Christmas and this fall made Christmas tree production difficult this year. He added that multiple nights of sub-freezing temperatures last December impacted trees, especially the Murray Cypress variety.