Editor’s note: In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
[T]is now the season to be merry, deck the halls, jingle a few bells and celebrate a little town in Bethlehem.
But for Peter Purinton and his extended family, it’s been Christmas pretty much non-stop since late spring. That’s understandable considering he’s got 16,000 balsam firs and other Christmas tree varieties growing in a field below his house in the scenic hills of Huntington. Starting this weekend, he’ll be dashing through the fields (or snow), jingling the cash register and the place will be humming in a hands-on ode to O Tannenbaum.
It could just as well be Oy Tannenbaum! As Thanksgiving drifts into memory and devolves into leftovers, at the Purinton Maple & Tree Farm, it’s all hands on deck at the 360-acre farmstead Purinton and his wife Carla have owned since 1984.
“We’ll sell around 2,000 trees, and half of them will be sold in four days,” says Purinton, referring to the first two weekends in December. Dressed in a blue-checked wool shirt and jeans on the weekend before Thanksgiving, he’s got a cold but looks relaxed in the calm before the storm. But soon, he and as many as a dozen helpers will be busy netting and ringing up cut-your-own sales for the nicely shaped trees that run in neat green pinstripes across the southward sloping hillside, with the top of Camel’s Hump in the distance.
Inside a workshop beneath his house, the elves have been doing the Deck the Halls stuff since well before Thanksgiving. On a recent November day, Purinton’s wife Carla, her sister Tammy and niece Lindsay are busy making beautifully decorated wreaths and balsam Christmas balls adorned with ribbons. It’s the value-added side of the business, turning trimmings into cash.
Purinton has spent the morning making maple sugar candies in the shape of Christmas trees, and the fragrance of maple sweets and balsam treats and the array of bright ribbons lend an intoxicating aura to the atmosphere. Enter and it’s like being dipped in the essence of Christmas.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a rural green state, Vermont has deep roots in the Christmas tree business. In 1923, Vermont’s own Calvin Coolidge began the presidential tradition of lighting a national tree on the ellipse between the White House and Washington Monument – with a tree cut in Vermont. And it was New England neighbor Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, who in 1856 brought the first Christmas tree into the White House.
Putting up a Christmas tree, a practice that began in antiquity as a winter solstice celebration, is something that 25 million-30 million Americans do each year, according to the National Christmas Tree Association. There are around 15,000 Christmas tree growers in the U.S., with Oregon, North Carolina and Michigan leading in production. The most recent figures indicate Vermont is 12th, with around 130,000 sold.
“We’ve got growers that sell 15,000 trees, and also growers that sell three or four hundred,” says James Horst, executive director of the growers association for Vermont and New Hampshire, which has around 200 members. At his Mt. Anthony Christmas Tree Farm near Bennington close to the New York border, he grows 60,000 trees, many of which he sells wholesale each year.
“It’s a tough business, but managed well, it can be profitable,” he says. Or as Purinton puts it, when asked why he got into growing Christmas trees, “I didn’t have enough to do,” a response he delivers with laugh.
It takes work to grow a Christmas tree, but even more it takes a leap of faith, and a stash of cash. “It’s a risky business; these guys really take a long-term gamble,” says Tim Schmalz, who inspects Christmas trees for the Vermont Agriculture Department. He notes there are more than a few tree farms that got away from farmers and that are now a dense thicket of 15- and 20-foot trees.
“An overgrown Christmas tree farm is like the wrath of God,” he quips.
When Purinton plants a 3- to 4-year-old seedling to replace trees cut the winter before, at a cost of 80 cents to $1, he’s betting the farm on a crop he won’t be able to sell for seven or eight years, or 10 years if you want a nice tall 7- or 8-footer. Not many other crops have that long a payback.
His balsam firs face the typical, and not so typical, odds that all farmers face, such as bad weather, pests and disease. Dieback can also hit up to 20 percent of the seedlings and the vagaries of growth can render a tree into an unsightly jumble of branches good only for wreath-making instead of a $45 cut-your-own.
“It’s the Mother Nature factor,” says Purinton, who adds “you can figure it out paper all you want” but a lot of things can happen in eight years, slicing your bottom line instead of adding to it. He figures half the sale price can already be invested in a tree by the time it’s bought.
Still, the fragrant business clearly has appeal to growers like Purinton, who is 58 and was raised on a dairy farm in Bristol, well accustomed to hard work outdoors. Christmas tree farming is something you can do at home, and in his case it fits well with his massive maple-sugaring operation.
“It works off-season to sugaring,” he explains, with June through October the time he works on the Christmas trees. The work has variety too. There’s putting in new seedlings when the ground thaws, shearing new growth to shape the trees and making sure there’s only one leader on each tree. Then there’s fertilizing the trees and mowing between the rows three times a year “because we want it to be pretty.”
He’s also got to stay on top of bugs, such as the gypsy moth or balsam tree aphid, which in just a couple of days can curl and destroy new growth, affecting a tree’s shape, he says.
Walking out amidst the rows of trees, visitors will note he manages his business well. There are no Charlie Brown trees here, just thousands of nicely shaped cuttable trees, ranging up to 6 or 7 feet high, intermixed with seedlings and young trees 2-3 feet tall. Asked what defines a good tree, he says it’s an individual thing. “They’re a lot like people, some of them are chubby, some are short, some are tall, some are skinny,” he says.
According to Horst, “The segment of the business that’s growing the most is going to the farm to cut your own,” which also cuts out the middleman and the harvesting costs. It goes without saying that real trees are renewable, recyclable, non-toxic, and made not in China but often in Vermonters’ backyards, keeping money in the state.
It’s no surprise that Gov, Peter Shumlin will be visiting Purinton’s on Monday, Dec. 1, around noon to pick a Christmas tree to decorate the lobby of Vermont Statehouse – the fourth time Purinton’s has supplied one. Judging from the myriad ribbons hung in the workshop that attest to both Purinton’s prowess at raising trees and making quality maple syrup, it’s guaranteed to be a nice one.
