====================== Tales From a Texas Christmas Tree Farm by Darrell Bain ====================== Copyright (c)2001 by Darrell Bain First Published by SynergEbooks, 2001 SynergEbooks www.synergebooks.com Humor --------------------------------- NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. --------------------------------- *CHAPTER ONE* So Much Money; So Little Work My wife, Betty, and I both happened to read the same article in our newspaper, extolling the virtues of growing Christmas trees in Texas. We had just built a new home on a hundred acres about fifty miles north of Houston and the article caught our attention like a freshly hooked tuna. We were running a few cattle at the time, but we had already discovered the real meaning of the song _Home On The Range_: It meant that you could never go anywhere because as soon as you did, your cows were certain to get loose and eat the neighbor's garden or play tag with pickups on the county road, a no-good way to raise cattle. There were a lot more trucks in our neighborhood than we had cows. * * * * Whoever wrote that article should be ashamed of themselves. They made it sound as if growing Christmas trees was right up there with mattress testing as a sure-fire, lazy way to make a bunch of money. It's a cinch the author never tried it, because it sounded so simple and easy that neither of us even bothered to do any research on the subject. We simply ordered a few thousand seedlings and plunged in, visions of sugarplums stuffed with money dancing in our heads. * * * * In retrospect, I think there are two simple requirements for starting a Christmas tree farm: the first is a convenient hardware store (preferably one which gives easy credit) and the other is a money-making machine. The first we located, but we never have discovered where the other one lives. We suspect it resides in the bowls of the local bank though, because it always seem to have plenty of money to loan us. * * * * The majority of Choose and Cut Christmas tree farms in Texas (and in other states, too) are family owned and operated. In most cases one or both members have full time jobs away from home and work the farms on weekends. They also go to the farm on holidays and what would normally be vacation days, sick time and even funeral leave -- there's no sense in having to bury your trees along with the dear departed for lack of attention. In fact, when a new baby arrives, it isn't out of the realm of possibility that the new mother will call grandma in to baby sit and change diapers while she gets out of bed and tends to Christmas trees instead of the new offspring. Speaking of offspring, if you ever decide to get into Christmas tree farming, it would be a good idea to plant some husky young sons and daughters at the same time you plant your seedlings. There is a never-ending demand for labor on a Christmas tree farm and sometimes you can dragoon your kids into working for free. Don't count on it though. Just about the time they reach the age when they could be of some real help, it's more likely that they will turn their attention toward the opposite sex rather than acres of Christmas trees. Hormones have a habit of rearing their ugly heads shortly after puberty and so far, the genetic engineers haven't developed a tree with properly receptive pheromones which might keep the kids on the farm. They would much rather occupy themselves with removing bits of each other's clothing instead of taking off unneeded limbs and branches on the trees, or checking out attractive members of the opposite gender rather than staking up young seedlings. Right away, you might suspect that there is more to growing Christmas trees than you would first imagine -- and you would be overwhelmingly right. The thing is, when the first little seedlings are planted in the ground they look so innocuous and innocent that you start thinking what a snap growing Christmas trees is going to be, hardly more trouble than tending to a bed of pansies or a row of home-grown tomatoes. Unfortunately, little trees grow up to be big trees and the work required to tend to them increases in geometrical progression. It's sort of like a new bride thinking two cups of dry rice equals two servings after cooking when it actually expands to a volume sufficient to feed the South Korean Army. As the saying goes in the industry, "Never plant more trees than your wife can take care of." Or from the female perspective, it's far better to take an outside job and tend house on the side than try to help with all the farm chores that your husband never seems to get around to. That is, unless you want to develop muscles like Hercules, sun-wrinkled skin tougher than an old leather boot and hands bearing a distinct resemblance to the "before" pictures advertising miraculous arthritis cures. There is another downside, too: after you've been in the business a few years you will wake up one day and discover that your only friends are other Christmas tree farmers because that's all you ever talk about. It is somewhat akin to having a neighbor or relative who can't let a day go by without boring you with a rendition of every burp and da-da their child has ever uttered, then add insult to injury by hypnotizing you into glassy-eyed stupefaction by insisting that you see every video, home movie and Polaroid photograph they have taken over the last half century. Before long, you will begin to notice that the house on each side of you has a "For Sale" sign on it, invitations to social gatherings have become rarer than the black footed ferret and the answering machines of even nodding acquaintances are equipped with caller ID so they can screen out your calls. Is there a positive benefit to becoming a Christmas tree farmer? Sure. Christmas tree farmers belong to the only branch of humanity who do all their Christmas shopping in October and pay their Christmas shopping bills in December. There's no time to shop after Thanksgiving and Christmas is the only time of the year they have any money. We pay off our bank notes, credit cards and our suppliers at the end of December, thereby throwing their computers into a panic. They just aren't programmed to receive consumer debt payments at that time of year, probably causing no end of service calls when the computer monitors begin flashing error messages. Another benefit is not having to ever travel anywhere at Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving day is traditionally the day before the start of the selling season and Christmas tree farmers are scrambling to get their trees tagged, their cash registers programmed and extra help lined up to handle the load. It wouldn't make any difference if you could travel, though: by the time you reach the stage where you have trees to sell, you probably aren't welcome anywhere except at another Christmas tree farm and they would really prefer that you stay home; they have work to do! * * * * Christmas tree farming is a strange profession. You only get one payday per year (after all, who wants a Christmas tree in March or July?) and sometimes you don't get one even then. The majority of customers come out on Saturdays and Sundays, the weekend after Thanksgiving and the first two weeks in December. Unfortunately, they won't show up if it is raining. One stormy weekend and you break even for the year; two and the computers can rest easy -- you're not going to be paying off many bills that year. Three rainy weekends and you're dead meat, causing your friendly banker to begin rubbing his paws together at the thought of all the interest he's going to collect for financing next year's operations. Besides becoming a schizophrenic/paranoid at the thought of rain in December, there's the rest of the year to worry about. It is always either too hot or too cold to work; too wet or too dry for the trees to grow; too windy to spray or too muddy to get a tractor into the fields and on the rare periods when the weather decides to cooperate, the boss picks that weekend for you to work overtime or little Matilda's asthma acts up and you spend all day at the emergency room telling the kid to hurry up and get well so you can get back to the farm. If none of these things happen, your truck is sure to break down and you can't go to the farm anyway. * * * * Most people think Christmas tree farmers must be rolling in money. Sometimes they are, in December, if it hasn't rained or the bugs haven't eaten your trees or a drought or freeze hasn't killed them and your help has showed up and your equipment has worked right and someone hasn't set up a retail lot right down the road where they are selling cut trees at half what you have to charge to break even, much less make a profit. However, those folks who think you're getting rich never stop to consider that all that money is the only cash you see for a whole year. Once when we were picking up our annual seedling order, just about the time several of the farms in the county had finally gotten far enough along to begin selling trees, one of our grower friends broke into a conversation with a leading question. He said, "Anyone here who thinks they made more than a dollar an hour last year, raise your hand." An abrupt silence ensued, along with a shuffling of feet and downcast eyes. Not a hand was raised! -------- *CHAPTER TWO* Anyone Can Grow Christmas Trees. It's Easy! We planted our first seedlings using the wrong tool, the wrong spacing and the wrong technique. Our rows were as crooked as a Rocky Mountain goat path and we started so close to a tree line that the only sun those trees ever got was shortly before sunset in the middle of July. Since we didn't stake the seedlings to make them grow straight, their trunks would eventually have served nicely as templates for re-curved bows or pine wood boomerangs. Nevertheless, when the planting was finally finished, we stood back and viewed the newly planted field as proudly as a mother cat with half a dozen new kittens. The following spring the new field of Christmas tree seedlings still looked good to us, their green little tops appearing fresh and perky against the background of dead winter stubble -- that is, until new growth began to emerge. After that the seedlings gradually began to fade from sight beneath the burgeoning weeds and bahai grass like the multiple masts of slowly sinking ships. No one had told us we would have to _mow_ between the rows. Actually, mowing isn't that much of a chore. It only has to be done once a year. The problem is, that once a year mowing starts in March and doesn't end until November! That elusive money-making machine would have come in handy right about then; we had to buy a tractor and a bush hog. A bush hog is a wonderful implement; it will mow just about anything, including Christmas trees, as we soon found out. We bought a bush hog so wide that any seedling that deviated so much as a couple of inches out of line was promptly beheaded and as the trees grew larger, the front bumper of the tractor began breaking some of the lower branches. This was very disconcerting until we found out that those lower branches were supposed to be trimmed off anyway in order to leave enough bare trunk for customers to see how to saw them down. Having a foot or so of bare trunk helps wonderfully in getting trees into stands, too, as we found out later. * * * * Another thing the article didn't mention is that there are numerous insect pests, which just _love_ to chomp on Christmas trees. Aphids are tiny little gray bugs, which resemble ticks. They like to suck the juices from tender little shoots of new growth in the spring. Actually, the trees could probably spare a little sap, but aphids have this nasty habit of producing a sweet residue that attracts a certain fungus. The fungus has a black color. When aphids are left untreated the residue mounts, the fungus proliferates and before long you have a field of black trees. That isn't the worst of it, though. The fungus in turn acts like a high-powered pheromone on honeybees. They swarm around the ebony colored trees like a multitude of minuscule propeller-powered planes engaged in a gigantic dogfight. We found out in jig time that very few customers care to get stung by bees while picking out a black tree infected with what they think are ticks. * * * * We still hadn't discovered a money machine and the hardware store didn't carry spray equipment, but the same place where we bought the tractor and bush hog was more than happy to sell us a tractor-mounted rig consisting of a huge fiberglass tank and a wand to spray insecticide with. That took care of the aphids, but I doubt that many of the customers who came out that year ever went to another Choose and Cut farm. They certainly never came back to ours! * * * * Mowing alone won't take care of all the weeds, brambles and grass. A mower won't get right in under a tree. This led us to experiment with herbicides. Herbicides are chemical compounds, which kill weeds. They also kill Christmas trees, as we soon discovered. The problem is that the label giving directions for mixing and spraying might be decipherable by a rocket scientist but for duller intellects like us, they make as much sense as squaring the circle. The directions read something like this: _Prepare mixture by taking nozzle width times nozzle length divided by pressure plus one half the square of distance from nozzle to ground times the percent mixture to the second power of the deliverable rate per acre minus the square feet of the radius of the circle to be sprayed unless done in strips in which case divide by three before factoring in spraying seconds per tree divided by the logarithm of the distance to the nearest star and don't forget to allow for drift and drips (see separate formula which should equal the square root of minus one on windy days); otherwise add surfactant and multiply the reciprocal by wind speed plus dew point divided by humidity minus the factor of the multiple of the average temperature for the northern tier of states on the fifteenth of March plus ten per cent of ground temperature three point seven inches below the surface in your area._ If the directions for mixing the concentrated herbicide don't scare the pants off you, the Biohazard warning label will. It states firmly: _This mixture must be applied wearing a Type II NASA space suit with supplementary negative pressure gas mask on a cloudless, windless day while the temperature is between 79 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Follow these directions exactly, otherwise you will turn purple and grow tentacles from your ears._ Neither of us turned purple, but before we finally got the mixture and technique under control, we killed all of our seedlings two years in a row. We sure took care of those pesky weeds, though! * * * * Most city folks assume that Christmas trees just grow into that nice elongated pyramidal shape as if touched by a magic wand. We sort of assumed that, too, until our trees began to resemble short leafed kudzu vines entangled in abstract sculptures put together by not too bright four year olds. Some belated research turned up the fact that Christmas trees have to be _shaped_ into that traditional form. The most common method at the time involved a long, machete-like knife for shearing the sides of the trees and a pair of hand held nippers to touch up the top. This has to be done twice a year, in May/June and again in July/August when the heat and humidity in Southern Texas is roughly akin to the caldron of a steaming volcano. Betty tried to help with the shearing, but the second or third time a razor sharp knife slipped out of her sweaty hand and came whizzing by my head she was relegated to trimming the tops. This worked out pretty well until one day she discovered a snake in the tree she was working on. You could have heard her scream in the next county. I thought she must have nipped off a finger or was being attacked by a swarm of killer bees. When I discovered that it was nothing but a simple black snake, hardly more than four or five feet long, I turned to go back to work. Betty wouldn't leave it at that. She insisted that the poor snake be disposed of before touching another tree. Killing a snake with a shearing knife may sound like an easy proposition, but that was one smart snake. I plunged my knife in and out of the foliage like a fencing master on the attack but the snake was having none of it. As soon as I started poking on one side of the tree, it wiggled to the other side. When I tried to coax it to the top of the tree where I could get a clean swipe at it, it slithered back down the trunk. The foliage was so thick that half the time I couldn't see where it was anyway. All this time, Betty encouraged me. "There it is!" She shouted, pointing at the tree. "Where?" I asked, brandishing my knife like a medieval swordsman, poking and prying into the branches. "There! No, it's going to the other side!" "Which side?" I yelled, slashing and hacking like a gladiator in a Roman arena. "The other side, dummy!" I ran around the tree and whacked off some limbs. "No, no! It's up higher. Get it!" I lopped off the top of the tree. "It's still there! Now it's going down the trunk!" The bottom branches on one side of the tree flew through the air. Still no snake. "It's over here! Don't let it get away!" More branches disappeared, slashed to ribbons under the directions of my helpful wife. "It's going up again! No, wait! It's on this side now!" I hacked and slashed and poked and pried with my knife but that snake was leading a charmed life. Frustrated, I finally grabbed the tree and tried to shake the snake loose from it. Betty let out a horrified scream, as if she thought the snake was about to bite my arms off up to the elbow. The shaking flushed the snake back into sight. By this time it didn't have much cover left anyway. I grabbed my knife and renewed the attack. The snake wiggled and slithered and curled and twisted in and out of the remaining branches until at last it zigged when it should have zagged and my trusty knife cut it into more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle. I felt like giving one of Tarzan's famous ape yells until I took a look at the tree. It was in more pieces than the snake. For some reason, we never did manage to sell that tree. * * * * Hardly anyone knows it, but most Christmas trees have to be colored before they are fit to sell. They lose some of their chlorophyll in the fall and their normal bright verdant color fades to a sickly looking yellowish-green. Virginia Pines, the species of trees most often grown in the South, are particularly susceptible to this. Years ago, some young Archimedes came up with the idea of spraying the trees with a green, dye-like substance in the fall in order to restore the color and make them look like they do during the summer. When we heard that other Christmas tree farmers were doing this, naturally we thought we had to follow suit. And we did. Unfortunately, we never could get the trees to take much of the color. We lowered the dilution ratio, increased the pressure, prolonged the spraying time and widened the spray nozzle, all to no avail. Curiously, though we couldn't get the trees to take much color there was no problem at all in getting it all over ourselves. It was a permanent color, too, just like the label claimed. Fortunately, the tree coloring takes place in October. When inquisitive strangers asked us why we had painted ourselves green we simply told them that we were trying out our Halloween costumes. At best, coloring each individual tree is a tedious job, taking up weeks of the farmer's time. In our case the spraying period ran into months because we usually had to go over the trees two or three times in order to brighten them up enough to sell. This went on for several years until one fall day while I was mixing up the coloring solution I happened to glance into the bottom of a jug of colorant and discovered what was wrong. Most of the active ingredient of the colorant had precipitated out of solution and settled to the bottom of the jug in a sticky mass. I turned the container around so that I could read the label. There, in letters large enough for blind man to see, it plainly stated: _Mix Well Before Using_. When all else fails, read the directions. -------- *CHAPTER THREE* That's _My_ Tree -- I Think By the time you have worked on Christmas trees for a whole year they all begin to look alike, at least to our eyes. Customers have a different perspective. You would think that with several thousand trees to choose from, selecting one would be an easy process. And so it is -- if a single male comes alone, unburdened by wife, kids and/or girlfriend. We hand him a saw, he walks into the field, cuts down the nearest tree and is on his way home in less time than it takes for his wife to say, "You idiot. Do you call that a pretty tree? I wouldn't use that thing for a bird feeder, much less have it in our house." Families are different. The kids immediately run into the fields, shouting, "Here's one! Let's get this one!" "Come back!" The mother yells. "That one is too small (or too large)." "Here's another one! Let's get it!" The kids yell, brandishing their saw like one of the characters out of _The Chainsaw Massacre_. "It has a bad side. Come on, let's go this way. The trees look greener over there." "They all look the same to me," the father says, glancing worriedly at his watch -- kickoff time was ten minutes ago. The mother gives him a look usually reserved for the poor fellow when he tries to hurry her up while she is shopping for a new handbag. "Hey, let's get this one!" The kids yell for the umpteenth time. "It has a bad top. Let's go to the back, maybe they are prettier there. Stay together now," she says as the kids disperse to the four winds and begin combing twenty acres of trees, shouting out their finds, almost unbearably anxious to _cut_ a tree. Hours later you will almost invariably see them back up front, cutting down the very first tree they laid eyes on. In the meantime the father's face has developed an ominous glower -- he has already missed the kickoff and most of the first half of the football game he planned to watch after running out to the farm and cutting a tree. As families wander through the fields looking for that perfect tree, they begin narrowing down the possibilities to no more than a couple of dozen or so. Very quickly they realize that with twenty acres of trees, trying to return to one particular tree they have previously admired is somewhat like a surfer trying to find an ocean wave again. They begin marking prospective choices with whatever they have in hand: handkerchiefs, saws, our little tree totes (a handle with a loop of heavy twine attached), belts, coats and other bits of clothing and paraphernalia. On a busy day the fields soon begin to look as if a sudden windstorm had blown tons of loose debris onto the trees from a nearby flea market or second hand store. We have a closet full of jackets, hats and other pieces of clothing used to mark trees, which were never re-discovered. Once we watched surreptitiously while a wily woman walked in circles around a tree she obviously desired. It had a cap perched on its top, left there by another group who were trying to decide which tree they wanted. After the woman made several more circles she looked furtively around, then removed the cap and placed it on the adjoining tree. Her husband quickly cut down her new choice and carried it away. A few minutes later the owner of the cap showed up and shouted triumphantly, "Over here! I found it!" His family joined him and he proceeded to cut the tree the cap was on. His wife seemed a little dubious but she didn't argue. After all, it was her husband's cap. As I mentioned, after a while all the trees begin to look alike. * * * * Once when we was out checking the fields we found a little girl no more than five years old clutching the lower branches of a tree and crying her heart out. Her parents had left her there to mark a tree they thought they might want and hadn't been able to find her again. We took her back up front and eventually her parents showed up. Her mother wasn't worried that she had been lost amongst the trees but she was positively irate that her wee daughter had abandoned the tree she wanted! * * * * Christmas trees always look smaller in the field than they do in the house. We hear lots of sad tales from customers who relate how the year before, they cut a twelve-foot tree then had to trim it down to fit an eight foot ceiling. One lady told us this story then an hour or so later came back with her husband dragging a tree at least ten feet tall. "Did you move to a house with a taller ceiling?" I asked. "No," the woman replied, a sheepish look on her face. "This was such a pretty tree that we cut it anyway." From the look on her husband's face, we suspect that he was envisioning having to cut a hole in the ceiling to accommodate his wife's choice. Their kids appeared happy, though. In their minds, the bigger the tree, the more room for presents under it! * * * * Selecting a tree isn't the whole job. After it's cut, it has to have a ride home. We often wonder what some of our customers are thinking of when they drive out to the farm in a car not much bigger than a golf cart, stuffed to the gunwales with kids and presents from shopping expeditions, then cut a ten foot tree and all of a sudden wonder how they are going to get it back home. Once we looked up and saw a tiny little car driving away with a huge tree perched precariously on the roof. At first it looked as if they had thrown a blanket atop the car to protect the paint job, but then we heard a male voice cry, "Hold on tight, now!" We gazed at the departing vehicle with awe and apprehension: they had a ten year old boy sprawled flat on the roof of the car, holding onto the radio antenna with one hand and their tree with the other! We've often wondered if they ever made it home with that tree -- or with the child! Eventually we decided that in the interests of avoiding lawsuits from falling trees and kids we would secure the trees to vehicles ourselves. That was the year that Rob, our son-in-law, began helping us on the farm during the selling season for the first time. He began tying trees onto vehicles using something he called a "slip-knot". We soon discovered why it is called a slip-knot: if not done properly, it slips loose with the greatest of ease, and Rob proved to be much better at naming the knot than tying it. Soon we had loose trees scattered here and yon, accompanied by cursing men who were already distraught over missing their ball game. After that first day, slip-knots were banished back to the mind of their inventor. R.I.P. A boy scout Rob is not. -------- *CHAPTER FOUR* Love Those Kids! Choose and Cut Christmas tree farms are made for kids, especially city kids. Going to the country to cut their own Christmas tree is an adventure as wonderful to them as following Alice down the rabbit hole and making friends with Glenda the Good. Most of them have never seen the countryside other than from the window of a car and virtually none of them have seen Christmas trees growing right out of the ground. Until they see them like that, they probably think Christmas trees are spontaneously generated in the middle of parking lots on Thanksgiving day while they are home arguing over who gets the drumstick. Besides acres and acres of trees, we have lots of wooded areas and huge old oak trees with Spanish moss dangling from limbs, lots of trails and paths and a winding dirt road. One couple from downtown Houston brought along their eight year-old son. He climbed out of their car and tentatively looked around, staring in awe at the newly discovered vista. He turned in a slow circle, taking it all in, then perfectly serious, he looked up at his father and asked, "Daddy, did this used to be a park?" * * * * Most of the kids are fairly well behaved, or as much as you can expect them to be given the circumstances. They are a joy to watch and the eager look on their faces would cause even Scrooge to smile with delight. They can be mischievous, though, especially when they are members of a large family. One clan drove up in a huge van and dispersed a seemingly endless stream of kids, all of them as excited and exuberant as a litter of puppies let loose in a butcher shop. The parents obviously had prior experience with taking their rowdy bunch on excursions because they brought grandmother along to help corral them. She was a prim, gray haired lady dressed as if she had planned on going to a concert instead of to a Christmas tree farm. Nevertheless, she took off into the fields with the parents and kids, trying to look in ten directions at once in order to keep all of her grandchildren in sight. The family obviously had problems with finding that perfect tree because it was hours before they reappeared. The old lady's hair had come loose from its bun and hung in wind-blown strands. Her blouse was half out of her skirt and her slip was showing by several inches on one side. She was limping from traipsing through the fields in shoes meant more for a short shopping trip at the mall than walking on uneven turf for half a day. Her face looked as grim as if she had just come from a funeral and was now on her way to the hospital to visit a terminally ill relative. When the parents went to pay for their tree, she breathed a huge sigh of relief and lined up the half dozen or so kids and began herding them into the big van. She pushed them into it one at a time through the side door. Unfortunately, she forgot to lock the door on the other side. As she shoved the kids inside, counting off on her fingers, each of them promptly departed out the other door and got in line again. After using all ten fingers to count with, which was more grandchildren than she owned, she finally realized that something was awry. Peering into the van past several little heads, she saw the unlocked door on the other side with one of her charges just exiting. We're not used to hearing grandmothers cuss. She ran around and locked the other door of the van then blessed those kids out as if they had just come back from robbing a convenience store and pistol-whipping the clerk. She grabbed each one by the ear and prodded them into the van like a jailer locking up prisoners for the night, counting them off in a voice filled with fire and brimstone. Presently the parents showed up, looking pleased as punch with their tree and their pleasant day in the country, blissfully incognizant of their seething elder. We can't remember whether those customers ever came back, but we can say for sure we never saw that grandmother again! * * * * When kids see all our Christmas trees they naturally begin thinking of Santa Claus. We help these thoughts along by all of us wearing Santa Claus hats to jolly up the atmosphere. Kids have their own ideas about Santa, as we found out one day. I was greeting newly arrived customers, wearing my Santa Claus hat and dressed in jeans, a bright red long-sleeved shirt and black boots. I had also grown a beard that year which came in mostly white. While I was talking to the parents who had a small boy in tow I lit up a cigarette and stood there with it in my hand, taking an occasional drag from it. The boy stared intently at me for a long time, a puzzled expression on his face. Finally he looked up at his Dad and spoke up, loud enough for everyone within fifty yards to hear, "Daddy, I didn't know Santa Claus smoked!" After that, I tried not to smoke while children were around but habit soon got the best of me. Soon I was puffing away, regardless of who was present. I rationalized it by deciding that kids need to learn about the real world anyway, and there are far worse things they will discover than that Santa Claus has an occasional cigarette while dispensing Christmas trees. I mentioned that kids are usually well behaved. Kids will be kids, though, and some of them tend to get really rambunctious or even downright bratty, especially when their parents spend an inordinate amount of time searching for that perfect tree. Occasionally, they will even desert their parents and head back to the greeting and parking area, leaving us to try keep them amused until their parents return. On busy days this sometimes meant that two or three of us were doing nothing but watching wayward kids. It got to be such a problem that it was actually hurting business until Betty came up with a brilliant idea. She suggested a haystack for the kids to play on and it worked like a charm. In fact, it worked almost too well. City kids have rarely seen live, growing Christmas trees but even fewer of them have ever had the occasion to play on a haystack. Before we even had the hay bales piled properly, the haystack was swarming with kids. On busy days, it was hard to even see the straw for little arms and legs and heads tumbling around over the stack and throwing hay into the air. Many of them even lost interest in finding a Christmas tree and had to be dragged away by their parents. By Golly, that haystack worked better than any three baby sitters we could have hired! Even the haystack couldn't keep some kids out of trouble. A few years after we began selling, we bought a couple of baling machines to wrap the trees in nylon netting in order to make them easier to handle. These are simple devices, resembling large funnels. As the trees are pulled through the larger end toward the smaller, the netting feeds over a retaining ring and neatly condenses the width of the trees to less than half the original size. The larger baler was attached to a waist high table but we left the smaller one set at ground level. One busy day while all our attention was elsewhere a three year-old boy with an overabundance of exploratory instincts got loose from his parents and proceeded to crawl through the small baler. As he came out the small end, the netting came loose just as if he were a Christmas tree and wrapped him up as securely as a caterpillar in its cocoon. Just about then his mother caught sight of him and began screaming bloody murder, thinking he must surely have been injured. His father took one look and saw that the boy was in no danger whatsoever. Restraining his hysterical wife, he turned to us and said with a relieved grin, "Never mind. Just leave him netted up until we get him home." It sounded like a fine idea to us and even the mother had to laugh a little once she calmed down. * * * * Our shop, a galvanized steel structure where we collect the money, sell ancillary items and use for shelter during inclement weather worked fine after we got it built. The only problem was that it had no flooring and when it rained water ran inside and made the footing muddy. We solved that dilemma by having a load of pea gravel dumped inside. No more muddy feet. However, that created another problem. Kids are absolutely fascinated by the layer of tiny rocks. They kick them, throw handfuls of them in every direction and in general like to play in the gravel almost as much as they do on the haystack. After seeing that the kids can't hurt themselves with it, parents generally don't pay much attention. One set of parents rued this attitude, though. They ignored their little two year old while they were paying for their tree. In the meantime, he was busily scooping up handfuls of gravel and depositing them inside his shirt. By the time his parents caught on to what he was doing, the little fellow had so many rocks inside his shirt that he looked like a pregnant dwarf and had already crawled inside their car, where he promptly pulled his shirt loose and spilled the gravel inside. If they used a vacuum cleaner to remove it from their car, it probably didn't work too well after that! * * * * We are always amazed at how careless some parents are with their kids. They let even the little tykes roam around unsupervised when they can plainly see the dense woods on three sides of the Christmas tree fields. Fortunately, we haven't had any of them get lost in the woods yet, but a constant problem is parents who arrive with kids who have fallen asleep on the way. Rather than wake them, they simply leave them in their car, usually with the doors unlocked. One day while we had several customers present, all of them out in the fields, we heard a nearby car door open. Out stepped a two or three year old girl, sleepily rubbing her eyes. Seeing nothing but strangers around and not knowing where she was, she naturally burst into tears. Fortunately, Betty was handy and she has a way with kids. She got the little girl calmed down and amused her until the parents returned a half hour later with their tree. They seemed to think nothing was wrong with leaving the child alone for so long. The child got her revenge, though. Betty had done such a good job with her that she pitched a holy fit when her parents started to leave. She wanted to stay with Betty and go look at the trees! * * * * As an advertising gimmick, we give away a little money each year, using pre-printed entry forms. One day a family consisting of parents, two small girls and a boy of about ten arrived. The boy happened to wander over to the prize box where the entry forms were deposited. When he read that the top prize to be given away was a hundred dollars, he refused to go with the others to look for a tree. Instead, he hung back while they were gone and filled out entry form after entry form, obviously having come to the conclusion that the more times he entered, the better his chances of winning. He really wanted that hundred dollars. He was still writing when the rest of the family returned with their tree. We figure that when he grows up he is going to be either an accountant or a Mississippi riverboat gambler! -------- *CHAPTER FIVE* We love Pets During Selling Season Betty and I like pets. We've always had a dog or two and an indeterminable number of cats hanging around the farm and saw no reason to change after we got into the Christmas tree business. At first. We have no idea why anyone would want to load up a dog (or occasionally a cat), haul it fifty miles out to the country then have to worry about tending to it while they look for a Christmas tree. Certainly the pets don't care what kind of tree their owners choose and that's the only reason we can think of for bringing them along. Nevertheless, they do: big dogs, little dogs, medium sized dogs, kittens, and one family even brought along a parrot in a cage! The first few years we opened for business, we allowed the owners to let their pets run free. The dogs loved all the new country smells they had never sniffed before, so much that sometimes they tried to run in four different directions at once, unable to decide which scent to try tracing to its origin. That didn't always work out so well. We remember one little dog. Its owner was a portly woman dressed in plaid pants and blazer and she arrived carrying a little half grown cocker spaniel in her arms. It sported a little plaid jacket, which fit around its front legs and body, obviously specially ordered to match its mistress's outfit. She set her coveted pet down on the grassy turf, thinking it would relieve itself then jump back into her arms when it was finished with its business. Instead, it immediately began wagging its tail and sniffing the earth. It ran in circles for a moment then let out a yelp and took off for the woods, obviously on the trail of a rabbit, which had passed that way. "Bessie Lou, come back!" the overweight woman yelled, waddling in the direction of the woods where her pet had disappeared. The little dog paid no attention to her command, though it did yelp a time or two to let her know that it had important business to take care of. "Come back!" The woman pleaded again. We heard Bessie Lou yelp several more times, but its cries grew fainter and fainter and soon faded into the distance, heading down toward the bottoms. The woman spent hours calling for her pet, but it was never seen again. When she finally left, disconsolate at her loss, we assured her that we would call her if Bessie Lou ever came back. We didn't have the heart to tell her that the bottoms were full of hungry Bobcats and ravenous alligators. That's probably where her pet ultimately ended up. If not, we hope it kept on its jacket; it gets cold in December, even near Houston. * * * * Our own dog caused no end of trouble. He was a "gift" from one of Betty's friends who couldn't keep him in an apartment any longer. Once we saw him it was easy to see why. The dog was named Punky and when Betty led it into the house for the first time I ran for the gun cabinet, thinking she had begun consorting with monsters. Punky was a huge, coal black chow. Even his tongue was black. So were his eyes and they glittered like bits of shiny coal dredged up from a mine run by Beelzebub. His teeth were long, white and needle sharp, the only portion of him not colored black as death. His appearance was like something out of a Stephen King novel. If you didn't know him it was like meeting a your worst nightmare in the flesh. To top it all off, he was constantly curling his lips in a friendly grin, displaying his shark-like teeth. It's a good thing he was friendly, otherwise he would have been shot on sight while he was still a puppy. His appearance wouldn't have been so bad (once you got used to it), but I simply could not train him to stay in the yard. He insisted on jumping the fence and running down to greet our customers when the selling season arrived. He would go up to each newly arrived person and curl his lips in a grin, displaying his terrible white teeth and black tongue and mouth, looking as if he intended to gobble them up just as soon as he could decide which part of their anatomy to start on. Kids ran screaming from him and adults backed away in utter terror. It did no good to tell them that he wouldn't bite; his appearance alone was enough to evoke nightmares and no one wanted to come close to him. Our customers disappeared in droves, muttering about devil dogs under their breath. Betty and I were both too soft hearted to dispose of him and our county is so far out in the boondocks that it has no animal shelter. Fortunately for our business (if not for Punky), he caught some sort of doggy disease and died suddenly. Poor Punky. All he ever wanted was a pat on the head and an occasional friendly word but his appearance was against him. Our next dog was a Chihuahua. We named him Tiger. He fell in love with one of our neutered cats, stayed home most of the time and never ever curled his lips at customers. * * * * The neighbors' dogs are a different matter. Some of them are huge old hound dogs who think they own the countryside, including our farm. Most of the time they are out in the woods chasing whatever hound dogs chase, but shortly after we placed picnic tables under the big oak trees they began nosing around during selling season, looking for scraps. Or complete meals in some cases. One day while I was up front directing traffic I heard an irate scream, coupled with curses fit to peel paint off the benches. I looked up and beheld a hound dog only slightly smaller than a medium sized rhinoceros atop a picnic table where a nice young couple had spread out their basket of goodies. The woman was screaming at the dog and the man was beating it about the head and shoulders with an oak branch, which had fallen from the tree. It made not the slightest difference. The hound straddled out its legs to the four corners of the table, tucked in its ears, lowered its head and downed the contents of the luncheon basket in a few huge gulps. The only thing he left uneaten was a pickle and an unopened coke. If there had been a gun on the premises, that would have been one dead hound dog. As it was, once he finished his meal, he jumped down from the table and trotted off, not even bothering to thank the couple for their generosity. They left a few minutes later and that was one more customer we never saw again. After that episode, we kept a BB gun handy and used it to discourage strange dogs. It worked, too, even though the next time I saw that big hound I wished I had a 30-30 instead of a pellet rifle. * * * * One year, a family came out with two young boys. As soon as they stepped out of their car we began hearing meows. Betty and I both were curious enough to approach the boys in order to see where the meows were coming from. Each of them was carrying a small kitten in a little pack worn on their belly. The kittens were cute enough to have posed for calendar pictures and seemed content to stay in their little packs as the boys and their parents began their search for a tree. Hours later we suddenly realized that we hadn't seen them since. Scared that they had wandered off into the woods, we began to look for them. We finally found the boys and their parents at the very far edge of the field, right where a tangle of blackberry vines demarks an old fence line, with thick woods immediately beyond. From deep within the thorny tangle of the blackberry forest we heard the faint cry of a kitten. It had heard a dog at the next farm over barking and immediately jumped out of its pouch and headed for shelter, as far into the brambles as it could crawl. For hours the boy and his parents had been trying to coax the kitten out of the briar patch but it refused to come. Finally the father, eyeing the rapidly sinking sun, gritted his teeth and offered his tender flesh up to the thorns. We couldn't bear to watch so we went back up front. Well after dark the family finally trudged back to the parking area, kitten firmly in hand. They had spent the whole day trying to corral the kitten and never did pick out a tree. They said they would be back the next day but they never showed up. We suspect that was their last trip to the country. At the very least I'll bet they never took a kitten with them again! After that episode, we made a rule that all pets must be on a leash, thinking that would solve our pet problems. It did, mostly, except for one recent incident where a boy failed to snap the leash securely to their dog's collar. Immediately, it headed for the bottoms and the deep woods, ignoring its master's cries to come back. Eventually we had the boy, his father and two of our hired hands chasing the disobedient dog through the brush. Probably it had never been in the country before and coming back to a leash was simply unbearable when there were all the wonderful new odors to explore. The boy's father finally caught up with it a half mile away where it had decided to go for a swim in a seven-acre lake. The father went for a swim, too; he decided that was the only way he was ever going to get the leash on his pet. He came back cold, wet and thoroughly disgusted but still wanted to look for a tree; that is, until I made the mistake of telling him that the lake was full of alligators which were probably out and hungry due to unseasonably warm weather. He turned ghost white and fainted dead away. When he recovered, the family left without a tree. They did take the dog, though, which we classified above and beyond the call of duty. Personally, I would have thrown it back into the lake and let the gators have it! -------- *CHAPTER SIX* Hired Hands Never Cause Problems Christmas tree farmers have to do most of their own work, otherwise labor costs eat up what little profits are possible. Nevertheless, there are times when hired help is necessary, especially during selling season. Most growers in our area use local High School boys. We live in a rural county, which has not a single McDonald's, so the boys are readily available and glad to get the work. When selling season nears we are inundated with calls from teenagers wanting to work. One of our grower friends solved the problem of deciding which of the plethora of applicants to hire by limiting his work force to members of a nearby High School football team. He was well satisfied with them, bragging of how hard they worked and what good shape they were in for wrestling big trees around after a season of playing ball. We had about decided to follow his example, but the selling season sneaked up on us that year before we could make up our minds. As usual, we just picked the most likely looking prospects who called us and went with them. As the selling season approaches, Christmas tree farmers quit watching television, reading newspapers of listening to the radio; all their energy goes toward getting ready to open. Our friend should have been listening to the news. A couple of days after Thanksgiving, we got a frantic call from him asking if we could spare him a few hands. "Are you selling that many trees?" I asked, jealousy eating at my bones. Our business was lagging that year. "No," he complained, sounding as forlorn as if his wife had run off with the milkman. "Our football team is in the playoffs and can't work on weekends! What am I going to do?" We gave him the names of some of the boys we hadn't hired for one reason or the other, then forgot about the matter. Our own farm was taking up our whole attention and then some. Later we learned that the football team he had been relying on went all the way up to the semi-finals, which in Texas meant that they were still on the gridiron in the middle of December. Lacking any other solution, he wound up calling in his grown sons and daughters to help but still wound up almost killing himself before the season was over. He shouldn't have bragged. Hubris will get you every time. * * * * Most Christmas tree farmers eventually turn to other family members for help. One of our first hires was our pretty thirteen year-old granddaughter, Bridgette. For the first couple of years we used her to help greet customers and direct parking, but as she blossomed into an exceptionally attractive young lady, she began gravitating toward the operations area, where the boys were. The work there almost immediately slowed to a crawl and the boys began botching things up like The Three Stooges working in a Nuclear research factory. Trees went through the baler backwards when they got there at all. Trees began falling off vehicles where knots had been tied with breakneck speed so the boys could hurry back to where Bridgette was standing around looking like a fairy princess waiting on kisses. Her presence even fouled up the cashier; the boys began drawing little hearts and arrows on the tags used to tell her how much to charge. And accidents began to happen. The netting on the baling machines comes in one continuous roll. After a tree passes through the baler and is enclosed in netting, one of the tasks the boys performed was bunching the netting at the end of the tree in one hand and cutting it loose from the roll with a pair of scissors. One young man's eyes strayed to the twin protuberances enhancing Bridgette's sweater and his scissors missed the netting completely and cut a vicious gash in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. That finished him for the day and that finished Bridgette in the operations area. We made her an assistant cashier where she was out of sight of the boys and the work returned to normal. * * * * We should have known better after the episode with Bridgett, but one year when we were short of help we hired the eighteen year old sister of one of the boys. Though she was perfectly capable of doing any of the jobs we assigned her, the boys vied with one another to keep her from doing anything the least bit strenuous. They hung around her like supplicants at a prom trying to entice the belle of the ball to dance with them. As she was a couple of years older than any of them, they had no real hope of obtaining a date with her, but the work still slowed down again until we found something else for her to do. Sex and Christmas trees just don't mix well. * * * * The year before Bridgett began working for us, we contracted to provide a hundred cut trees to a nursery for a nice sum of money. The agreement called for us to cut and stack them for pick up the day before Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, a day or two before we were scheduled to cut and drag the trees out of the field I strained my back so badly that I could barely walk. We called frantically around for help but none was to be found that particular day. Finally Linda, our other daughter-in-law, mentioned that her sister, Polly, was out of work and could use the money. In desperation we hired her, agreeing to pay her a hundred dollars for the day. Polly is a hefty girl and she had no trouble at all handling the little chain saw we gave her to cut the trees. She had them all down and out of the field by noon and went away just as happy as we were. Unfortunately, that was before we began using herbicide and she neglected to tell us that she was allergic to poison ivy. The next day she was broken out from head to toe with huge weeping blisters, which itched so badly that she cried all the way to the doctor's office. It took ten days and two more visits to the doctor before she got the poison ivy under control and before it was over her medical bills amounted to three times the hundred dollars she had earned from cutting the trees. It was a long time before Polly ever came to work for us again! * * * * Rob, our son-in-law also began to help out during selling season. He is a salesman by profession and is very good with the customers. He is also very good with the ladies. One busy day while he was supposed to be greeting new arrivals, he disappeared, leaving us to try to fill his vacant position. None of us, including our daughter, Pat, could figure out where he had gotten off to until an hour or so later he came back, accompanied by a young woman who could have stepped straight out of a Playboy Centerfold. He was carrying her tree over his head and stumbling over stumps because he couldn't take his eyes off her voluptuous curves. I couldn't blame him much, but Pat wasn't very amused. She took him by the ear and put him to tying trees onto vans, a task which doesn't leave much time for lollygagging with pinup queens! * * * * As business increased, we planted more and more trees. Eventually, we had so many coming on that we couldn't handle all the shearing by ourselves. Shaping the trees is a very exacting task. Do it wrong and the trees won't sell that year, if ever. We had learned by trial and error (mostly error) how to do an acceptable job and in turn tried to teach the technique to some of the boys who worked for us during the selling season. I guess neither of us is a very good teacher because we never could get them to shear trees in a way that satisfied us. We finally gave up on the boys and resigned ourselves to working daylight until dark for six weeks out of every spring and summer in order to get the trees sheared. Then one day while I was running an errand in town I saw this Hispanic looking fellow walking along the side of the road. Visions of Cubans or Puerto Ricans swinging machetes in sugar cane fields popped into my mind. Could shearing Christmas trees with a knife be much different? I stopped and gave him a ride, then using a mixture of pidgin English and what little Spanish I remembered from high School, I asked him if he was looking for work. "Si!" He exclaimed. We headed back to the farm. Betty speaks fairly good Spanish. After conversing with him for a few minutes, she informed me that he had walked all the way from Guatemala looking for a job. "Anyone who will walk a thousand miles looking for work must be reliable," I said to Betty. "Ask him if he can use a machete." "Si!" He said, hearing a word he recognized. We presented him with a shearing knife, which resembles a machete except for having a square end and being much lighter. He hefted it with a happy gleam in his eyes. Betty and I exchanged pleased glances. At last! Someone who knew what they were doing! We took him out into the fields and demonstrated our shearing technique, with Betty doing the interpreting. He seemed to catch on immediately and we left him with it. Several hours later he knocked on the door. "Finis," he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. Before paying him off for the day we took him back to the field he had been working in. I almost cried. He had sheared the trees all right. All those four and five foot trees were now less than two feet high and what little greenery was left on them would hardly have sufficed to decorate a fireplace mantle. There was little left of them but trunks and bare stubs of branches with a few lonely needles hanging on here and there. "Manana?" He asked hopefully, smiling proudly at his accomplishment and obviously hoping to get his hands on the rest of our trees the next day. "Proximo Anos," Betty said. Next year. She didn't tell him to keep walking north, but she may as well have. Those trees never did recover. I guess a shearing knife isn't that much like a machete after all. * * * * When we first began selling, we used a measuring stick with various heights marked on it to price the trees as customers brought them back to the operations area. This worked fine for a few years, but as our farm grew larger, it became increasingly cumbersome. A few years ago we stole an idea from a neighboring farm and began attaching different colored ribbons to all our salable trees before we opened for business, then gave each customer a flyer as they checked in which listed the price of each tree with a particular colored ribbon attached to it. That way, the customers always knew the price of their tree before cutting it. This method pleased everyone. The customer was satisfied because he or she or they could simply look at the table on the flyer and shop for a tree bearing a ribbon in their price range. It helped us out by speeding up operations and even saved us the salary we had been paying for one of the boys to measure each tree as it came in. It also did wonders to eliminate errors at the cashier's window because an important part of the system included having the hands tag each tree as it came in. The tag comes in two parts, each bearing identical numbers. On the bottom part, the boys simply write in the color of the ribbon attached to the tree and the customer takes this part to the cashier's window to pay. There, the cashier charges according to the ribbon color then attaches the receipt to the tag and the customer takes it back to the loading area. There, one of the boys matches the number on the customer's part of the tag to the number still attached to the tree, returns the customer's receipt and keeps the tag. At the end of the day, we total up the tags and note how many of each category of trees have been sold. A great, foolproof system that worked so well, we would have gladly paid for the idea if we hadn't already filched it. Then things began to go awry. Many customers began to complain irately that someone had written the wrong ribbon color on their tag and they were being overcharged. A somewhat lesser number pointed out that their tags had been marked with a ribbon color, which was less than what they should be paying. We couldn't figure out what was going wrong. Again and again we went over the system with the boys. We watched them from a short distance away and they seemed to be doing everything right, but the mistakes kept occurring. Finally, by literally hanging over the shoulders of the boys as they marked the tags we figured out what was wrong. That year we had hired two fifteen year-old twin boys. They were hard workers, good with the customers and very conscientious. Unfortunately, it turned out that they were color blind in most portions of the spectrum and had been desperately trying to conceal the fact from us because they needed the job. They had been asking the customers what color the ribbons were or in some cases simply taking a wild guess and hoping they were right. Murphy's Law applies to Christmas tree farms just like it does everywhere else. We kept the boys on because they were such good workers, but we made certain that they never marked another tag! -------- *CHAPTER SEVEN* The Selling Season. What? Us Worry? As the selling season approaches each year, Christmas tree farmers become so schizophrenic that they should all be committed to an asylum. Some of the craziness is excusable, though. When you only get one paycheck a year and it depends on the weather, the vagaries of disloyal customers who check out other farms, the appearance of your trees compared to those of other growers and the price of cut trees at retail lots, it is easy to see why most of us walk around blubbering our lips with our forefingers at that time of year. One day we think we have the prettiest trees grown since Santa Claus invented them and the next day we are convinced that we couldn't give them away if we tried. One week we are counting all the money we think we'll make and the next we're hustling off to have our lawyers draw up bankruptcy papers. We follow the long range weather forecasts as earnestly as a stockbroker poring over the Dow-Jones averages and count the trees available for sale so many times that it's a wonder they don't grow numerals instead of needles. We spend half our days poking and prying into the interior of our trees looking for aphids and even if we don't find any we spray for them anyway. We go over our advertising budget as assiduously as a grad student doing his dissertation for a doctorate in molecular biology or nuclear physics then panic at the last moment and double the amount we intended to spend. The next day we are likely to call in and cancel all our newspaper ads and shift the money to television or radio. We worry so incessantly about crucial supplies being delivered on time that we call our suppliers at all hours of the night and day and if we can't get them to come to the phone we complain to their kids. A single fire ant hill can send us into a gibbering panic and one early sale induces a belief that every tree on the farm will be sold by the day after Thanksgiving. We check our equipment so often that nuts and bolts are stripped to bare metal and belts and pulleys are worn out before they ever see their first tree. Christmas tree farmers never have to diet. They get so addled before and during the selling season that it's not unusual for 150 pound growers to drop 15 pounds in a month. Sex is just something you heard about back in August or September and if you have kids you've probably forgotten their names by the first week in December. Pets go unfed, the house never gets cleaned and dirty dishes pile up in the sink. They aren't dirty because you've eaten out of them; they are simply dusty from never being used. The only Christmas cards sent by us are the ones urging friends, relatives and tradesmen to buy their tree from our farms. We rush here and there frantically trying to get ready for opening day and frequently trip over our own feet from trying to go in three directions at once. The men gritch because they have to be out selling trees during football season and the women complain because they can't go shopping for a full month. Kids get off to school and come home with notes from the their teachers asking why they didn't wear shoes to class. Bills go unpaid because you have spent the last of your previous year's income months ago and if the lights don't get turned off, the gas or water will. The trash goes without being emptied until you have to wade through the house and sleep, if you ever have time to get any is broken up by nightmares about rain, insects, inoperative equipment and terrible dreams of everyone in the country opting for an artificial tree this year. Selling season is a grand old time except for those few little worries just mentioned. It is a great profession if you don't mind having your hind brain take over your forebrain for six weeks out of every year then spending another six weeks getting them back in their proper positions. * * * * Christmas tree farmers are constantly trying to dream up ways of not only getting customers out to their farms, but providing inducements which will bring them back year after year. One method we discovered which works is ancillary sales, and the best of these turned out to be a little alcove we added to our shop to sell food and drinks from. We decided not to try running this operation ourselves. As addled as we get during the selling season we were afraid we would wind up serving bread sandwiches or hot chocolate flavored with Coca-Cola. Instead we franchised it to a nice lady named Jessie Green who was experienced in catering and Barbecuing. We provide the space and take ten per cent of her gross in payment. She sells lots of food, but we never make any money because we run a tab with her, not having the time or the sense to do any cooking at that time of the year. If it weren't for her, we probably wouldn't eat at all. The same thing goes for our help. The boys are typical teenagers, able to consume enough hamburgers and hot dogs in a single day to feed Paul Bunyon and his Ox on the side. Besides that, Jessie makes the kind of hamburgers that were sold in the olden days and haven't been seen since McDonald's and Burger King drove all the other hamburger joints out of business with their cardboard concoctions. The younger generation today has not the slightest idea of what a real hamburger should taste like. The first time one of the boys bit into one Jessie had just taken off the grill his eyes lit up like twin halogen lamps and a beatific grin split his face almost in two. "Hey!" He called to the other boys, "Come try one of these 'burgers! They're great!" The other hands rushed to try them, too and ever since they have never brought a lunch to work. Jessie would probably make a profit even if she never sold a hamburger to a customer; the boys provide just about all the business she can handle, but they don't collect much take-home pay anymore. They spend most of their wages with her! * * * * Betty just loves to make jam and jelly. While we were both holding down full-time jobs, she made just enough for us and our grown kids and their families, but after I stupidly quit my job and took over some of the housework her production increased until we had jars and jars of it sitting in the pantry. One year she remarked casually, "I wonder if I could sell any of this at the shop?" Actually, we didn't have the shop built yet back then; we were still working out of a canopy, but I still thought it was a pretty good idea. That selling season we set up a card table with a couple of dozen pints of homemade jelly. That proved to be one of her better ideas. Sales have increased each year until now she can barely keep up with the demand. There's a downside, though. I like her jam and jelly much better than the store-bought stuff, especially her plum butter. It goes so well on hot, buttered biscuits that I begrudge every pint that goes out of the house. The first year she sold every pint she took down there, then robbed the pantry of the jars I had set aside for myself when dollar signs started popping up in her eyes. The next year I sneakily put a price tag of ten dollars on every pint she had, thinking no one would ever pay that much for the stuff. Wrong. It sold out almost immediately, leaving me bereft of my favorite condiment until the plums ripened the following summer. Now Betty goes through the house every selling season, looking in my medicine cabinet, under the bed, out in the pump house and behind the files in my office desk, searching for concealed plum butter. Damned if I'm going to let the customers have all of it, even if it does sell for more money than some of our trees! * * * * Providing Christmas tree stands for our new customers so they don't have to make an extra trip to Wal-Mart also brought in a little money, but those first stands we sold probably lost us more customers than we won. They were made of a metal bowl with long screws sticking out here and there and laughingly advertised as _The _Easiest Stand You'll Ever Use_._ We sold them for two years before we tried one of them ourselves. I swear, it took two hours to get our tree in that stand. Even with Betty helping, I would no sooner get one screw or bolt in place than another would come loose. The tree tipped over three times during the process before we got it shakily upright -- more or less. From then until Christmas day we tiptoed around the tree for fear that vibrations from our footsteps would cause the whole thing to collapse into a pile of bolts, screws and wing nuts. The next year we changed brands and donated that monstrosity to a church. We've prayed about it since, but God still probably hasn't forgiven us for that perfidy. * * * * Betty used to pick out our own tree on Thanksgiving day, then mark it "Not for Sale". Like Betty with her jelly, I see dollar signs everywhere during selling season, too. Several years in a row, after we began running short of good looking trees I directed customers over to the one she had selected and they bought it, every time. Finally, she had enough, and the next year made me cut the tree on Thanksgiving day and bring it to the house and place it in a bucket of water until time to put it up. I just can't stand to see a customer leave without a tree. The second weekend in December, I escorted a picky customer up to the house and sold them Betty's tree again. That did it. Now she just waits until we are near to closing and picks whatever is left. I never felt guilty about it. The way I figure it, if she can sell my plum butter, I can sell her Christmas tree! * * * * One inducement we thought of to bring extra customers out to the farm was advertising that we gave away free greenery. This was no loss since we always had some Charley Browns which only Charlie himself might be interested in. We cut them down then nipped off the branches and put it out, free for the taking. The free greenery was such a hit that within a couple of years we began running short of non-salable trees to cut up for greenery. So many customers were interested in the fresh green branches that last year we got the idea that we might be able to sell some of it. We bundled little bits of it into various sized bunches and priced it at two or three dollars and be damned if it didn't sell like hot-dogs at a ball game! When we think of all that free greenery we have given away over the years when we could have been selling it we cuss ourselves for idiots. Of course we are probably idiots forever getting into this business in the first place. -------- *CHAPTER EIGHT* Growing Without Pain Even Christmas tree farms have to grow and mature if they are to survive and compete. During the heyday of the industry in Texas, Christmas tree farms began springing up in every idle field and pasture, the land-owners thinking, just as we had, that growing Christmas trees was a fine way to put idle pasture land to use and make a bundle of money besides. Even the local High School FFA planted a couple of acres of seedlings as a project for their students. The end result of this proliferation was a surplus of Christmas tree farms -- but not a surplus of decent looking trees. As soon as most of these Johnny come late lies realized how much back-breaking work is involved in growing Christmas trees they began dropping out -- but not before they produced some truly awful looking trees. This wouldn't have mattered except that they tried to recoup the money they had invested by advertising their trees at cut-rate prices. This induced many first time visitors to Choose and Cut farms to decide that if this was the quality of trees being produced on the farms they would stick to retail lots, or worse, switch to an artificial tree. There is one exception to this bane. One nearby farm has remained in operation over the years even though he rarely shears his trees, doesn't color them, rarely sprays for insects, uses very little herbicide and mows only when the mood strikes him and grows his trees in an area that turns into a sea of mud at the least little sprinkle. He stays in business by advertising that he will sell any tree he has for ten dollars, regardless of size. This naturally draws a lot of prospective customers to his farm and even though most of them leave without buying a tree, enough of them do to keep him going. The ones who leave without a tree have to pass by our highway sign on the way back to Houston and many of them decide to give us a try. When they compare our trees with his, the sale is almost a lay down. We hope he never goes out of business! We weathered this years-long crisis by working harder than ever and doing our level best to produce a superior tree and provide a pleasant atmosphere where families could take an excursion into the countryside and truly enjoy the experience of being able to select and cut their own tree. One of the things we did to make our trees stand out from the crowd of also-rans was to buy a shaking machine. One of the flaws of pine trees, especially Virginia pines, is that they shed needles all year round. They shed because any particular needle on the tree only lives two or three years then falls off. It seldom makes it all the way to the ground, though; the foliage on Virginia pines is rather thick and the needles usually hang up in the interior of the tree where it is almost impossible to remove by hand. Hence the shaking machine. There are various sorts of the machines on the market, and as a rule, the more you pay for one, the better it works. We bought a type, which has a metal arm with a wide well at the end of it where the trunk is placed. A cam under the arm is attached to a belt driven by an electric motor which in turn bumps the tree rapidly up and down and shakes the needles loose -- with some help from our faithful crew. One of our hands holds the tree upright while it is shaking and one or two others reach inside with gloved hands and help the loose needles on their way to the ground. It is possible for one person to do the whole operation, but it isn't an easy task, especially when the trees are wet. Then the needles cling to the inside of the tree with the tenacity of barnacles on a ship. We had to hire extra help to keep the machine going all the time because our customers truly appreciated having all the old dead needles removed from their trees and almost all of them opted to have their tree cleaned even though we charged a dollar fifty to have it done (the machine cost almost a thousand dollars, plus interest to our friendly banker for the loan and it had to be paid for someway). All in all the shaking machine was a great success -- except for one problem. You wouldn't _believe_ how much pine straw can be shaken out of a thousand or so trees. Soon after we began the operation, pine straw began piling up around the machine at an amazing rate. We ran for the house and brought back yard rakes to pull it out of the way but that was only a temporary solution. Pine straw rose higher and higher around the machine in heaps so large that it looked as if the boys were working shoulder deep in a well. It got so high that it began to be an impediment to the very operation it was designed to correct. The boys were having to drag the trees over so much straw surrounding the machine that they gathered more needles than ever and shaking the new addition loose only added to the massive piles. We broke the handles of both rakes trying to move it out of the way to make room for even more. Something had to be done, and quickly. We hired an extra hand and bought eight or ten rolls of large plastic garden bags and put the new man to filling the bags and stacking them out of the way. By the time he had bagged up all the loose pine straw he had a stack as tall as the roof of the shop -- and it was still growing! Betty and I got the bright idea that perhaps customers might buy some of it as mulch for their flower gardens, so we put up a sign advertising it for a quarter a bag. In two days we sold two bags and the pile was higher than ever. Finally I put up a sign, which read, "Free Pine Straw Mulch! Take all you want!" That did the trick. Offer someone something free and they will take it whether they can use it or not! The pile dwindled and most of it eventually left the farm, loaded in pickups or into trunks of cars and the interior of vans. It was a close call, though. Given a couple more days and we might have had to start paying customers to haul it off! There was a curious sidebar to the shaking operation. We set it up in the same general area where we baled the trees. The combined operation proved to be absolutely mesmerizing to our customers, young and old alike. When we are going full blast on busy days, there is always a crowd on hand, standing in a semi-circle several layers deep watching the trees bounce up and down on the shaker and being pulled through the funnels of the baling machines and wrapped in netting. If we had the nerve to charge admission we wouldn't have to worry about rain. We could make as much money from selling tickets as we do selling trees! * * * * Each year we faithfully bundle up a wad of money and send it off to the IRS, which covers our income tax, social security tax and self-employment tax. It never occurred to us that the State of Texas might want some, too until the comptroller caught on to the fact that Christmas tree farms weren't collecting the state sales tax. A nasty letter informed us that we should begin complying, forthwith. Honest citizens that we are, we sent off for the required sales tax permit. Imagine our surprise when we found out that not only were we expected to collect taxes for the state, we were required to _pay_ for this dubious pleasure in the form of a fee for the tax permit. I don't mind so much having to collect the state's taxes for them (well, I do mind, but never mind), but being forced to pay for the privilege strikes me as adding insult to injury! * * * * As our farm grew in size and years in operation we naturally had bigger trees for sale. This began to create a problem for customers trying to carry or drag large heavy trees back to the operations area, especially ones cut at the farthest reaches of some of the fields. For a while we hired extra help to wander through the fields and offer to help the customers, especially women and the elderly, but this soon proved to be too expensive to continue. We thought the problem over for a year or two while the tress grew larger and larger and racked our minds trying to devise a solution that wouldn't involve a lot of expense. Finally we came up with a little device that we called a "Tree-Tote". It consists of a length of PVC pipe about four inches long with a loop of heavy twine running through the pipe. The pipe serves as a handle and the loop of twine is simply twisted around the trunk of the tree, which can then be dragged along without too much effort. The tree-tote proved to be a huge success after we learned that even small children could pull a fairly large tree along the ground by using it. We got them into general use by telling parents that kids "just loved to use them". And really, they do. A child can't carry a very large tree, but with the tree tote he can fully participate in getting the tree back to the shaking and baling area. One customer worked out a unique innovation. One day we spotted a rather large tree moving along apparently under its own power. We blinked and did a double take, then saw that this inventive man had somehow instantly trained his dog in the technique. Along it came, holding the handle in its mouth and dragging the tree along behind while the family strolled beside it as if they had planned it that way from the start. It's too bad we didn't have a camera handy; we could probably have taken pictures and sold them all day long at a dollar apiece. * * * * One of the banes of any southern Christmas tree farm is fire ants. This problem is compounded by the fact that many of our customers are displaced northerners who enjoy going to Christmas tree farms because they were used to going to the forests up north and cutting their Christmas tree. Unless they have lived here for a while, they have no conception of how ferocious fire ants can be when they are disturbed. They swarm from their mounds in viciously aggressive hordes, attacking anything that moves. Their bite is extremely painful and leaves red, pus filled welts behind. As our farm aged, fire ants became an increasingly serious problem. Mounds seemed to appear overnight and treating the mounds might kill a few, but their prolific queens can replace the biting worker ants faster than they can be killed. Inundating the mounds with insecticide only annoys them; they simply move the mound a few feet away and are back the next day, more aggressive than ever. There's no telling how many customers we lost who got bitten or saw their children stumble into a mound of ants before they knew what was happening and begin screaming with pain. It got to the point where every Saturday and Sunday morning during selling season we had extra hands come in early and walk up and down each and every row of trees putting out ant poison. Besides the extra salaries we were having to pay, the stuff we were using to try controlling the ants cost a fortune. It was as if those fire ants were deliberately trying to bankrupt us -- and they very nearly succeeded. Finally, one of the chemical companies put an insecticide on the market which kills the queen and that finally solved the problem. We bought a truckload of the stuff and treated all of our fields in the spring and again in the fall. Our fire ants have disappeared for the most part, but something tells me they have simply gone into hiding, waiting for an opportune time to come ravaging forth, probably in the same year when we have three rainy weekends, just to put the icing on the cake! * * * * As our farm became well known in the area, we began to get more and more requests to donate trees to various organizations. Now we are as generous as the next person, but we never have figured out why everyone and his brother thinks we should be overjoyed to give a free tree to them or an association of some kind. Churches are the worst offenders. Almost any church you care to name has a congregation well enough off to be able to afford to buy a tree, but for some reason they think a church shouldn't have to buy one. Why not? They wouldn't think of going into Wal-Mart and asking them to donate Christmas lights or decorations and I've never heard of a customer who will stroll into a store and blithely ask for a free Christmas tree stand or wrapping paper and bows. I imagine they think that we have so many trees that we would never miss an odd one here and there. Perhaps we wouldn't, but when the requests start running into the dozens, we have to draw the line somewhere. Lately we have limited our donations to the volunteer firemen and Toys for Tots. Besides those two, we give a free tree to anyone in the county we know of who has lost a child during the year. One representative of a nearby church called us last year. "We're having a Christmas party at our church and we need a tree," the lady said. "Fine," I replied. "We have lots of them for sale." "Oh. I thought maybe you would be willing to donate one," she replied, the tone of her voice implying that she had just realized she was talking to Mr. Scrooge himself. "What charity is the party supporting?" I asked wearily, thinking that if it was for a worthy cause perhaps we could spare one more tree. "Oh, it's not for anything," She said. "We're just having a party and want a tree." When I politely declined, she wasn't to be put off. "Well, if you can't donate a tree, do you know someone who will?" I thought for a moment then gave her the name of my chief competitor and hung up. I don't know if she got a free tree from anyone but I sure have to give her points for chutzpah! -------- *CHAPTER NINE* Questions We Love To Answer Ever since our first few customers drifted out to our farm, we have been inundated with questions. For some odd reason everyone we have ever met exhibits a curiosity worse than a cat in a toy factory about every little detail involved in growing Christmas trees. Ordinarily we don't mind questions but sometimes on busy days it gets to be a real problem. Rather than go on out and hunt for their tree after we have greeted them, a lot of folks hang around and query us incessantly about the background and operation of our Christmas tree farm. In the meantime, impatient customers waiting their turn get irritated at the delay and bypass the greeter entirely, wandering out into the fields with no saw, no flyer and not the slightest notion of what they are supposed to do next. While waiting for their tree to be shook or baled, customers interrupt the boys at their work and slow operations down worse than a teenage girl in a bikini would. Even after they have gotten their tree, customers will block the cashier's window for half an hour at a time asking her questions, unmindful of the long line forming behind them. One year we wrote out the most frequently asked questions and posted them, along with stock answers next to the cashier's window. It was not the slightest help. The customers prefer to talk, not read. Next, we spent a good deal of time and money producing a huge collage of pictures depicting operations which take place on the farm at various times during the year, along with a written explanation beneath each picture. We showed views of every operation we could think of: shearing, mowing, spraying for insects, putting out herbicide, planting, topping, trimming, staking and so forth. We even included pictures of Betty making jelly and me doing the quality control with a hot buttered biscuit. We posted the collage in a prominent spot in the shop and waited for results. The collage attracted lots of attention. Crowds of customers gathered around it and discussed the display among themselves. Did that stop the questions? No, it increased them! Now the customers wanted to talk to us about every single aspect of operations pictured! We have about given up trying to solve the problem, simply writing off the time spent answering friendly queries as part of the price of doing business. I guess it is good public relations, but we'll never know how many customers never come back because they had to wait so long for us to get to them while we were busy talking to others! We have developed stock answers, though, and the boys have learned to talk while working, especially after we handed out a list of the most often asked questions to them before opening for business and told them how to answer. As for us, we have our own list. It goes something like this: "How did you get started in this business?" _"It started as a hobby and sort of grew on us. Now we're so far in debt we can't afford to quit."_ "How long have you been growing Christmas trees?" _"All of our lives. At least it seems that long,"_ "What kind of trees are these?" _"Virginia Pines, but we grow them better than Virginia does."_ "How come some of the trees are greener than the other ones? Are they different species?" _"Mumble, mumble."_ We hate to admit that Christmas trees have to be colored, but sometimes the question is more direct and has to be answered honestly, if somewhat circumspectly. "What's that green color on the trees?" _"Evergreen trees lose some of their chlorophyll in the fall and the color fades."_ "But what's that color on the trees now?" _"It's just something we apply as a color enhancer."_ "Is it toxic?' _"Not at all. It's sort of like a food color."_ It isn't, but they wouldn't understand what we were talking about if we gave them the chemical formula. "Do you have to mow very often?" Now this is a silly question. Anyone who has lived any length of time near the gulf coast knows how fast weeds and grass grow if untended. _"We only mow once a year."_ "Really? When do you do it?" _"From March until October."_ This answer usually draws a puzzled look until they catch on, then they grin sympathetically. "How do you get your trees to grow into such pretty shapes?" They ask this question after having just looked at pictures showing me with a shearing knife and Betty with her nippers. _"We use some real sharp tools."_ "I'll bet that's a lot of work!" _"Yes, but it beats commuting to Houston. Besides, my wife (or husband if Betty is fielding the questions) does most of the work. I just supervise."_ "Do you have to fertilize them?" This question is always asked by farmers. _"We don't have a clue. The industry hasn't been established long enough to know."_ Now this is an honest answer. We really don't know whether fertilizer is necessary or not. "Where do you get your seedlings from?" _"From seedling companies."_ "Oh. How would I go about getting a few? I'd like to plant some for a windbreak (or for a shade tree or for landscaping or to grow their own Christmas tree). _"Come see me in January while we're planting. We'll sell you some. Only two dollars each."_ The seedlings cost us six cents each but we try to discourage anyone from buying them from us as bare seedlings when we're selling them in pots for eight dollars. "Sounds reasonable. I'll be sure and come see you then." Hardly any of the prospective planters ever show up in January. By then they are worrying more about how to pay Christmas bills than driving forty miles to buy a few seedlings. "How long does it take to grow a tree like ours?" _"Long enough for us to get mighty friendly with our banker. Why don't you count the rings on your tree and see how old it is?"_ Hopefully, that's what they will do and quit asking silly questions. "Is growing Christmas trees a lot of work?" _"Not at all if you are eighteen year old quadruplets with strong backs and lots of mechanical ability."_ "Oh. I'll bet you make lots of money, though, don't you?" _"We sure do. See that Cadillac I'm driving?"_ I point to my battered, twelve year old pickup. The customer cocks his ear toward the _ding-ding-ding_ sound of the cash register ringing up sales then looks at me disbelievingly. The questions go on and on. "How do you plant the trees?" _"With a dibble."_ "What's a dibble?" _"It's a tool we use to plant the seedlings."_ I point to the dibble, which looks like a thick, narrow shovel. "I'll bet that's a lot of work, isn't it?" _"It sure is, but it's good exercise."_ I pat my flat stomach, which hasn't seen a decent meal since the week before Thanksgiving. "How many acres do you have here?" _"We have fifty acres left. We gave some of the land to the kids."_ "That sure was nice of you." It sure was. Keep the kids close and you can always use them as a source of cheap labor. "Is all your property planted in Christmas trees?" This, when thick forests border the fifteen acres of trees on three sides. _"No, we have lots of woods left."_ Can't he tell an oak tree from a Christmas tree? "I'll bet there are lots of deer out here, aren't there?" _"Yup. Also cougars, bobcats and alligators."_ "You must hunt a lot." _"Not so much anymore."_ I haven't had time to hunt since the year we planted our first seedlings. "I have some land I'm not using for much. How would I go about getting into this business?" _"Come see me after Christmas and we'll be glad to advise you."_ We will, too. Why should we be the only idiots trying to make a living this way? "Do you have to irrigate the trees during the summer?" _"Nope. We just let them die when we have a drought."_ That answer isn't far from the truth. Some growers have put in irrigation but we've never been able to afford it. One exceptionally dry year we lost every seedling and a goodly number of two year old trees. "How about hurricanes? Do they hurt the trees?" _"Not as long as they keep making tomato stakes."_ This gets me another puzzled look, but I don't go into what happened when Hurricane Alicia came ashore and passed directly over our farm. It flattened every tree we owned and I spent weeks scouring the county for tomato stakes. Eventually I bought every one I could find and Betty and I spent a month staking the trees back upright. "Well, you sure have a nice place here. We've enjoyed the experience." The customer shakes my hand. _"Thanks. Nice talking to you."_ The next person in line steps forward. "Hi. Nice place you have here. How did you get started in this business?" Betty takes my place and says, _"It started as a hobby and sort of...."_ If we could charge for answering questions, we'd be rich! -------- *CHAPTER TEN* Great Minds And Great Ideas We were already selling Christmas tree stands, jam and jelly and the snack bar was a going concern when we attended a Christmas tree growers' convention. While we were there, Betty attended a seminar explaining how other ancillary items such as wreaths and handicrafts could increase farm revenue so much that one would hardly have to bother with trees anymore. Stories were related of gift shops bringing in thousands upon thousands of additional dollars and fresh hand-made wreaths selling so fast it took an extra cashier to handle the business. Betty was all enthused and it sounded great to me, too. We certainly weren't making much profit on our trees despite all the hard work. As an added inducement to expand our ancillary operations, Betty had finally gotten fed up with her job and retired, which greatly reduced our income. Her salary had been supporting the farm for years while I struggled with the trees and learned all sorts of new things about housekeeping and cooking. If we could bring in a few extra thousand dollars a year by making wreaths and stocking our shop with handicrafts, we figured on maybe hiring someone to watch the farm the next year and finally take a vacation. First we had to go see our banker, though. We borrowed enough money to panel and paint our barn-like shop so that it would look more like a gift shop than something cows lived in during the off season. That ran into much more money than we had counted on. After that, we bought a wreath-making machine, a few gallons of very expensive solution to color and fix the wreath foliage and a couple of hundred metal rings to make the wreaths with, along with a big plastic tub to dip the wreaths after they were ready for coloring and setting, then spent more money paying our son to build a drying rack for them (Well, they did say wreaths would sell as easily as popcorn at a movie, didn't they?). Next, rather than buy handicrafts then mark them up for sale, Betty decided to use all her spare time after retirement creating them herself. She decided that gift baskets would be easy to put together and even easier to sell but she never was much of a mathematician. She bought enough baskets to keep the Easter Bunny supplied well into the next century, along with so many rolls of cellophane and wrapping paper that our house and the shop began to resemble the stockroom of a catalog company. Next, she scoured Wal-Mart, Sam's and every grocery store within a fifty-mile radius for goodies to stuff into the baskets, along with enough cups and napkins to open a thousand seat cappuccino shop. My calculator overheated and began pouring smoke from its innards when I totaled up all the receipts. In the meantime, I had been no innocent bystander. I pored through Christmas tree catalogs looking for items that I thought might sell in our brand new gift shop. I bought Reindeer feed bags, wreath hangers, jingle bells and a ton of hand-crafted items made by some of our neighbors, then had some bookshelves built in the shop and stocked them with used volumes from my library. I let the calculator cool off and added all these items to the total then went out and got drunk. We had already spent more money on these great new innovations than we had made on the farm the last year! * * * * After recovering from my hangover I calmed down a bit and we got to work. While I began making ready for opening day, Betty began putting her baskets together. She stuffed them with ham, candies, cookies, Christmas cups and cloth napkins, exotic teas, coffees and cocoas and unshelled nuts then topped them off by placing a jar or two of her home-made jelly in each one. She carefully wrapped them in cellophane and decorated them with bows, ribbons and beads. Besides the baskets of goodies, we had gathered about half a ton of pinecones and bought almost an equal amount of paraffin. We dipped the cones in hot melted paraffin, then filled decorated baskets with them and called them "Fire starter Pine Cones". We also used some of the pinecones to help give the gift baskets, and later on the wreaths, a Christmassy look. Not only did her baskets look great, but she took a coupe of examples around and showed them to some of the ladies she had worked with before retirement and immediately sold over a hundred dollars worth of them. The next day, Rob spent another hundred and fifty dollars, buying the baskets to use as gifts for his employees. We were off to a great start! We made another hurried trip to the basket factory and bought more goodies. We even ordered some business cards: _Betty's Gift Baskets. Custom designs available._ The first ominous rumble came when Betty decided to take her gift baskets to a local trade fair a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. Poor thing, she sat there all day, suffering with a horrible cold and bundled up against an early cold spell and sold only one basket! Well, trade fairs were one thing; Christmas tree farm gift shops are another. We refused to become discouraged. She spent some more money for supplies to decorate the shop to make it look nice then a couple of days before Thanksgiving we turned our attention to the wreaths. Betty had seen a demonstration of wreath-making technique. I hadn't. We cooperated on snipping buckets and buckets of foliage from errantly growing trees that we didn't think we could sell then proceeded to attach it to the rings. Our first attempts looked more like horse collars than wreaths, but Betty quickly became more adept and the wreaths began to look very attractive. Betty's productions did, anyway. I couldn't seem to get the hang of it. It wasn't until a week later that Betty called my attention to the fact that I was attaching the foliage to the rings backwards. By that time it didn't matter, though. No matter how great the wreaths looked, no matter how attractively Betty decorated them and no matter how low we dropped the price, they simply weren't selling. Neither were Betty's baskets or the handicrafts I had bought or the reindeer feedbags or my books. After an investment of several thousand dollars and weeks of work, we wound up selling seven or eight wreaths (at marked down prices) and not much over a hundred dollars in gifts. There was one consolation, though: we had five wreaths in our house for Christmas, each of the kids carried home several and every relative down to second cousins got a gift basket for Christmas! Not only that, when we opened up the remaining baskets, we stored away enough goodies to last us all next year and then some. We would still like to know where that lady who conducted the seminar got her information from. Whatever, we suspect that she owns stock in a wreath making supply factory and is part owner of the basket factory in Jackson. There is no other explanation which makes sense! * * * * There was one other thing we tried that selling season: living Christmas trees. A grower friend of ours has been experimenting for several years with Leyland Cypress Christmas trees, one of the newest varieties of trees being grown and sold in the southern tier of states. Besides growing them as trees to be cut, he has begun cultivating them in pots and supplying them to other Christmas tree farmers wholesale, at a cost which would make even Bill Gates think twice before investing in them. They are very pretty trees, though, and environmentalists are rearing their ugly heads in the Christmas tree industry, refusing to cut a Christmas tree for fear that every citizen in Houston will be asphyxiated when it stops producing oxygen. We held our breath and ordered twenty large Leyland Cypresses in pots, twenty medium sized ones and forty seedlings. We transferred the seedlings into clay pots Betty had gotten as seconds at pottery factory. I had intended to sell the large Leylands for $59.00 each, but when I brought the first load of them home, Betty took one look at them and exclaimed, "You're not going to sell those trees for fifty nine dollars. They're too pretty to sell at that price!" In for a penny, in for a pound. I shrugged and marked them up to $79.00. Those Leylands were what saved the year. We made enough profit on them to almost compensate for what we lost on the wreaths and gift shop! In fact, when we got down to the last two, Betty and Pat grabbed them and used them for their Christmas trees! I tried to sell Pat's one evening but her door was locked and Betty, knowing me, had chained ours to the floor. They are planted in our front yard now and still look just as fresh and green as the day I bought them. Maybe the tree-huggers aren't that far off base after all. * * * * There was one other calamity the year of the gift shop and wreath fiasco. As the farm grew older, so have I and it has become increasingly difficult for me to keep up with all the work. Besides that, we had over-planted and for the last several years had more trees than we could possibly sell. I began culling and downsizing. If Betty isn't much of a mathematician I must rank somewhere down there with the dummies who have to count on their fingers and toes and still can't add two and two. Somehow I miscalculated the number of trees I was culling. I didn't pay much attention because business was terrific that year (other than wreaths and the gift shop), but around the tenth of December I suddenly woke up to the fact that we were already cutting rather heavily into the trees reserved for the next year. For the first time in years, we had to close early. It almost broke my pecuniary heart to have to turn away a couple of hundred prospective customers but if we intended to stay in business there was no choice. Those last ten days before Christmas were the strangest we have experienced in a long, long time. We were so used to being open until Christmas Eve that our minds refused to admit that we were off work. We wandered around the house and farm in a daze, trying to turn December into January. There was one good thing, which came of it, though. For the first time in ten years, I got to watch the last two weeks of the regular football season. Not only that, since we are going to be short on trees next year, that gives us a good excuse to raise prices. Supply and demand, you know! -------- *CHAPTER ELEVEN* All of Our Friends Christmas tree farming is an interesting topic. We can talk about it for hours and hours and days and days -- and almost always do! Even this fascinating subject can get old though. After a while it gets to the point where our friends and family would rather watch old re-runs of _Leave It To Beaver_ than listen to one more rendition of how we had to plant our seedlings one year while snow and ice was still on the ground (which happens down where we live about as often as the Century Plant blooms) or sit through the umpteenth description of how hot it was when we were doing our shearing last July. I think the National and State Christmas tree growers associations were formed just to give us someone to talk to who doesn't mind listening to Christmas tree stories all year long instead of in December when normal folks might touch on the subject now and again. Most of us can't afford to attend the National growers convention but almost everyone who has been in the business very long makes it to the State get-together. Before the hotel lobby door finishes closing behind us, we are bubbling over with stories and enthusiastic tales about how the last selling season turned out. We get to see old friends (and other Christmas tree farmers are about the only friends we have left by now) which we haven't had time to visit with during the year and get to meet with those nice suppliers who have extended such easy credit during the year and only charged us twice what the articles would cost if sold in a department store. It is a fun time. The food is good, the drinks flow freely for those so inclined and conversation is limited to your favorite (and only) subject: Christmas trees. It isn't unusual to see an enthusiastic farmer taking a half hour to check into the hotel while he beguiles the desk clerk with an excruciatingly detailed description of his new tractor and spraying rig or relates the tale of how he conquered a rapacious army of aphids with only his bare hands and a Boy Scout knife Conventions have other purposes besides fun and conversation. The program may include seminars for new growers, which are attended mostly by old growers who laugh uproariously each time a technique is demonstrated and they remember how badly they botched it when they first began farming. For instance, the lecturer will be talking about the proper spacing of seedlings when they are first planted and one of the old hands will burst into laughter as he turns to tell the farmer sitting next to him how he planted his seedlings three feet apart then discovered that his mower had a forty two inch blade. Sometimes an entomologist will be invited to share his knowledge of what kind of insects like to eat Christmas trees for lunch. The list reads like a handbook annotated from an explorer just returned from the Brazilian jungle. Take scale insects as an example: these pests emerge from their cribs as little crawlers then settle onto the branches of Christmas trees and set up housekeeping. They form hard protective shells which they hide under while turning a once attractive tree into something which looks like an overgrown pile of rusty steel wool. They are the very devil to kill, too. If they were a little larger, their shells would serve nicely as the body of an armored car or an M-1 tank. The entomologist recommends using an oil-based insecticide on scale insects. We tried it once and wound up with greasy, scale-infected trees. Another pest he talks about is the tip moth. These little critters begin life as tiny crawly caterpillars and prefer the tips of new growth as their main course, preferably the leading shoot at the top of the tree. They dig into it with a tiny little shovel then jump into the hole and pull the bark over them. Once inside they are safe from anything short of a flamethrower or concentrated sulfuric acid. The only way to get rid of them is to wait until they have consumed the tippy-top of your tree and emerge as little moths. You then have thirty seven seconds to hit them with an insecticide before a lady moth finds her a husband, consummates the marriage and lays a clutch of eggs which will hatch out three seconds later into a second generation of crawlers and begin the cycle all over again. This time the bug expert recommends the use of something called pheromone traps to tell you when the moths come out to breed. They are called pheromone traps because they attract you to the fields in the middle of the night to see how many moths you have captured. There, you steal the shovels from the new crawlers so that they can't dig holes in the tips of your branches and will starve to death, thereby ridding yourself of future generations of moths. Well, that's what it sounded like to us. Sometimes entomologists speak in strange tongues. * * * * Another feature of conventions is a mass visit to the nearest Christmas tree farm where you can look over your competitor's trees and slyly steal his marketing secrets. One of our grower friends saw a sign reading PETTING ZOO and thought that might be a fine way to attract visitors to his farm the next year. He contracted with some little place that raises exotic animals and paid him a bunch of money to provide a petting zoo during the next selling season. He got one pot-bellied pig, a chicken and a miniature horse which didn't like kids. End of the petting zoo on that farm. * * * * Early on, we got the idea of using a mailing list to attract customers from another farmer. We changed his way of handling it in various ways and it has been a tremendous success, but don't expect to read about what we did. We're scared this book might get published and other growers adopt our methods! * * * * When the exodus to the nearest farm is complete, there is always a shearing demonstration. This is given by an array of salesmen from supply companies who are trying to sell their shearing machines. The machines work well, too, if you are capable of carrying forty pounds on your back all day and don't suffer from dizziness resulting from walking in circles around your trees all day while the machine snips off tops and side branches in a pattern which bears not he slightest resemblance to what you intended. The reason for this is that the instruction manuals come with wonderfully detailed instructions regarding maintenance, what to do if the machine doesn't work and three pages of small print listing part numbers, which are designed to fail just when you need the machine most. What isn't included is even a hint of how to shear Christmas trees with the super duper gadget. All the manual says is that "You get a perfect shape every time" and "Even inexperienced operators can shear up to a thousand trees in six hours". We bought one of those gadgets and promptly ruined every tree more than four feet tall. That wouldn't have been so bad, but we only managed to ruin about a hundred a day instead of a thousand, a production figure much lower than what I can manage with my trusty knife. The shearing machine sits in the barn to this day, gathering dust and sneering at us each time we look at it, as if telling us how dumb we are. * * * * Officers for the coming year are also elected at conventions. The way this is done is through a nominating committee. The nominating committee is made up of a few members who are rounded up after the bars close and who are still sober enough to talk. They slur out the names of some growers they know who will be so hung over the next day that they will be too weak to protest when their names come up. That's how they got me two years running, for treasurer and vice-president. After that, I left the bar before closing time and hid under the bed until the next morning. Officers work for nothing, as you might guess. * * * * Each spring and fall, the officers who have been elected at the convention organize what is called a "Field Day". It is called this because you spend all day out in the field of one farm or another, either freezing to death in March or collapsing of heat exhaustion in August. The purpose of field days is to get all the growers of your region together so they can review their mistakes of the previous year and plan on what mistakes they are going to make the coming year. For instance, one year we heard about a new super duper insecticide, which theoretically would take care of every bug which infests Christmas trees. We bought a bunch of it and used it all year. Every insect promptly developed a resistance to it and by Thanksgiving day we were as buggy as the inmates of an asylum. Only a quick spraying with an alternate chemical before opening day saved us from having to close the farm. * * * * Tradition calls for field days to be held at the farm of one of the officers of the organization. The year I was dragooned into the vice-presidency, we were the sponsors. For weeks we worked at sprucing up the farm, arranging for a catered meal and organizing a program for our fellow growers. It rained all day, forcing sixty or seventy people to crowd into our shop designed for a maximum of twenty or so. The BBQ was cold because the caterers were cooking in the open when it started raining and had to hurry it up. Echoes inside the building from seventy people talking at once combined with rain drumming on the tin roof resembled airplanes warming up inside a hanger, and suppliers who had come from as far as five hundred miles to show their wares went away without a single sale. It is hard to decide on a thing to buy when it is covered with three layers of plastic and a tarpaulin. All the work we had done to make the farm look pretty went for naught; the rain was so heavy all anyone was interested in was getting out of there without getting stuck! -------- *CHAPTER TWELVE* Rich or Poor? Some of our customers have been with us now for fifteen years. They have returned faithfully, year after year to buy their tree from us. If one were to look at our farm through their eyes, we would probably resemble some of those rich farmers who buy a new car every year, take vacations whenever they want to and pay cash to send their kids to college. It is hard to dissuade them from this notion, considering the changes, which have taken place over the years. The first year we sold trees they went for ten dollars apiece, your choice. We used the cab of the pickup for an office and my billfold for a cash register. We worked the trees with an old lawn tractor and I used a three-gallon tank worn as a backpack on the few occasions I sprayed for insects. Our trees were not colored and we still hadn't learned about using herbicides to get rid of poison ivy and other noxious flora beneath the trees. In fact, the branches of the trees started right at ground level because we still didn't know about making "handles" by trimming the lower branches up to a foot or so. All we sold were trees and we did all the work ourselves; we wouldn't have believed it if someone had told us that ten years later we would have to hire a crew of twelve or fourteen hands in order to handle the load. Most of our land was still wooded and I still had the time and energy to cut our own firewood rather than buying it. Over the years we have had bulldozers out to the farm again and again, clearing more and more land to plant in Christmas trees and on each occasion we spent more money than we earned from selling trees. In fact, every time we got a little bit ahead, we spent the money on the expanding Christmas tree farm. One tractor, then another. A barn to keep them in. A spray tank, pump and rear mounted mower. Supplies and more supplies and tools and more tools used to work the trees. I remember when we graduated from the cab of my truck to a tent to keep the rain off. We spent money on the tent and every year Rob and I put it up the day before Thanksgiving. And every year, the day after Thanksgiving, it blew down. You would think that two ex-Army Sergeants would be able to erect a tent that would stay upright, but it blew down as regularly as Big Ben strikes the time in London, which probably proves that sergeants use privates as tent putter uppers. We spent several thousand dollars on a permanent building to get us and the customers out of the weather and to protect us from the bitter north wind when a front blows through, then discovered we had made it too small, just as we had the barn. We added a storeroom and filled it to overflowing within a year. We paid to have a snack bar added to the shop and still haven't recovered the investment. Before long we felt the need for electricity at the shop and had a power pole erected and lights installed. We outgrew my billfold, then a wooden cashbox and bought a programmable cash register (that is one item that has probably paid for itself, even though the first couple of days of the selling season any resemblance between the tape and the cash in the register is purely coincidental. When you go a year without using the register it takes a couple of days to re-learn what keys to use). We bought a computer to keep up with the accounts then upgraded it a couple of years ago so that we could have a fax and get on line. The farm expanded to five different fields of trees and we used a bush hog, the rear mounted mower and a new lawn tractor to keep them mowed. We bought two expensive shearing machines operated by a two-stroke gasoline engine and carried as a backpack, both of which eventually proved too heavy for my weak back. We improved our road by spending untold thousands of dollars on grading, leveling, adding culverts and hauling in truckload after truckload of crushed limestone. We now own two different shaking machines and three different sized balers, two of which are operated with winches and pulleys. Traffic got so heavy that we had to order signs to designate a loading zone and caution customers about speed limits and watching for kids. We bought our own porta-potties and added an extra phone extension to the shop. The shop building has been improved and added to so many times that we have to look at a picture of the original to remember what it looked like in the original version. Our advertising went from word of mouth to a few classified ads buried in the "for sale" section to a budget, which runs into the thousands of dollars and includes television and radio and a mailing list of a thousand customers. We spent the money to have three highway signs erected and pay rent to the owners each year. Our annual bill for chemicals to color the trees, spray for insects, apply herbicide and keep the fire ants under control has expanded by leaps and bounds until it is one of the major expenses. Our customer base grew so large that we were forced to buy liability insurance to protect us from lawsuits and our payroll has grown to a level where workman's compensation insurance is a necessity rather than a luxury. Our farm has expanded and grown and improved so much that we have trouble remembering what it was like when we first started. And yet ... and yet ... when we look at our bank account we feel fortunate if it doesn't show an overdraft -- but before we got into this business we had plenty of money!. Our problem, like that of most Christmas tree farmers is that every cent we make and then some always seems to go right back into the farm. There is always something we need to buy or rent or repair or add to or pay off. Betty worked for years after I quit my job, earning more money than I ever did and we haven't a thing to show for it other than a Christmas tree farm that eats money like the cookie monster gobbles chocolate chip cookies and a few improvements to our house that we sneaked in over the years. In fact, if the farm and our car and truck and tractors and implements weren't paid for we would be eligible for food stamps and welfare! We have no pension or savings to carry us into old age and we can't sell the farm because no one else is dumb enough to spend that much money on a business where expenses exceed income more years than not -- the word has gotten out about Christmas tree farming to anyone who has money to invest! We had the farm appraised a couple of years ago and on paper we're worth almost a quarter of a million dollars -- but we don't have a pot to pee in! Any sort of major illness would do us in as surely as three rainy weekends during the selling season. Owning a Christmas tree farm is like riding the proverbial Tiger: Once you're on, there's no easy way to get off -- and yet one of these days we are going to have to. Arthritis is settling into my bones, making it harder each year to perform all the work, which has to be done to keep the farm going. The other farms around us which survived the shake-out a few years ago have become fierce competitors and we don't have much more maneuvering room; we are going to raise prices again next year, hoping we don't scare off too many customers, but you never know. In the last fifteen years we have advanced from ten dollars a tree, regardless of size, to a price range that starts at fourteen dollars and goes up to over sixty dollars for the large trees, and we still have trouble turning a profit. Getting back to those old customers who can remember where we were back then and where we are now, they are bound to think we are well off. We have a pretty, well maintained farm and beautiful trees. Our home, sitting on a little knoll back behind the tree line bordering the biggest field isn't a mansion but it's larger and more expensive than what most of them own. I still have my old beat-up pickup truck but we also drive a new Mercury Marquis, which is paid for. We don't lack for food or clothes or many other necessities which some of them have to do without. Everything considered, many of them probably envy us. And you know what? Maybe they have cause to! After all, we're relatively healthy and don't owe anyone any money and have an income of sorts, even if it is a little unpredictable. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel or any sort of reward or hope for the future that makes it worthwhile to keep going? Well, yes, I have to say there is. There is no greater thrill than seeing kids pulling their very own Christmas tree out of the fields, faces beaming and little hearts thumping vigorously at the thought of all the presents which will soon be laying beneath it, waiting on Santa Claus to come. Or the proud smiles of parents who have just had a joyful experience with their children they will remember the rest of their lives. Somehow, that makes it all worthwhile, even when the financial wolves are baying at the door. There's another reward, too. Not too many couples nowadays get to spend so much time together doing work that they really enjoy. And we do love our farm, for all the exasperating, frustrating uncertainties associated with it. And there's one more thing: owning a Christmas tree farm has enabled me to realize a life-long ambition. For the last seven or eight years, on rainy days when I can't work outside, or while watching a pot of beans while waiting for Betty to come home from work, or sometimes when I just get lazy and refuse to go out and fool around with the trees I have begun trying to establish myself as a writer -- and at last it is beginning to happen. I will have two paper back novels coming out this year and if you are reading this, I'll have a third book on the market later. Maybe they will sell enough copies so that the next time you hear about us we will be truly retired and vacationing somewhere in the Caribbean, soaking up the sun and enjoying Pina Colatas and exquisite seafood. It's a possibility. It could happen. But if it does, do you know what? We sure will miss those kids! THE END ----------------------- Visit www.synergebooks.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.