Last night it rained five plus inches in Linville, N.C.  I have a brook that runs outside of my house and I looked at it in amazement, it was running clear, you could see the bottom even though there was ten times as much water and lots of run off from lots of square miles of land.  Amazing!  Twenty years ago this would have been unheard of, this stream would have been muddy and would have deposited lots of silt in the process.  What changed?  The Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed which had lofty goals of zero discharge along with many other goals pertaining to erosion measures which have been a huge success.  The streams now for the most part run clear in North Carolina.  Those of us who are growing Fraser Fir Christmas Trees are contributing to clean water, in the past we had very little ground cover on our fields for parts of the year in our losing effort to fight the weeds but now due to low rate suppression round up applications we have beautiful ground cover that is often clover.  Business, government and environmentalist can make progress in making the environment cleaner and more pristine if we will work reasonably together.

Cool Springs Nursery is very happy that gas prices are down 11% from their highs in July and prices at the pump have decreases the last six days.  Fantastic!  Fraser Fir Christmas Tree Shipping season is three months away.  As we have stated history shows that once oil prices start sliding like they are, they normally continue to decrease for the next year.  Maybe we will get back to where we were a year ago before gasoline prices rose 33% and diesel rose 46%.  Diesel prices are now at a national average of 4.26 per gallon down 39 cents from the summer highs.  Let’s hope this trend continues.  There are some clouds in the sky, literally,  several hurriacane are forming in the Gulf of Mexico and it looks like there is a good chance that they will reach category four.  This is unfortunate for the oil business.  Hurricanes are a mix blessing for Fraser Fir Christmas Trees because when storms hit Louisiana and Florida it is 500-600 miles of flat ground between the Gulf and the mountains of North Carolina and there is nothing to stop the storm untill it hits the mountains.  When Charlie, Floyd and Ivan hit Louisana in 2004 it hit the North Carolina  mountains a couple days later.  One of these storms dumped over 30 inches of water on our fields of Fraser Fir, this is a little too much rain all at one time.  We also had record amounts of Phytophra in Fraser Fir fields the year after  because of all the water from these hurricanes.  Let’s continue to pray that the current tropical storm Gustav does not develop into a hurricane.    In addition  let us pray that oil prices drop along with inflation and that our country and economy will see better times a great leadership going into the future.

5.52. GDP Growth %, 1.88. Unemployment %, 5.70 … Current Economic Indicators.    August 21, 2008    (Close of Day). Indicator. Value. Inflation %,

No recession in these numbers! Fraser Fir Christmas trees have sold well for us in good times, in slow downs and in recessions.  At the retail level, Fraser Firs are relatively inexpensive for what you get, generally selling for $30-80.  When you compare all the pleasure and joy that a beautifully decorated Fraser Fir brings to the cost of one tank of gas at $50 - $70 dollars, then the tree is more than worth it.  Or, compare one meal for four at Applebee’s, at least $40-$50, to the cost of a beautiful tree at $50; the meal is an enjoyable evening and the tree, which is usually in the home for about three weeks, is enjoyed for a very special holiday season.  In spite of all the complaining, the cost of a Christmas tree is a fantastic deal and a lifetime of memories is priceless.

How is the Christmas tree a great deal?

Firstly: The typical six-foot Fraser Fir Christmas tree is 10 years old when it is sold. We estimate that it has had over 200 procedures (including fertilizing, shearing and weed control) performed on it by the time the tree is harvested; it gets the intensive care that a Bonsai tree gets.  The price is definitely worth it the care and attention a nice Christmas tree gets.

The second reason the trees are worth it is that they have contributed so much to the environment and the consumer contributes also by buying a real tree versus an artificial one.   For ten years, the trees fight erosion, provide habitat, produce oxygen and eat up carbon dioxide and monoxides.  If the consumer did not purchase these trees, then there would not be 75 million new trees planted each year and a total of over 500 million Christmas trees, doing all this work. Farmland preservation would be endangered.  The consumer who buys a real Christmas tree is a true environmentalist and is contributing to the environment. The buyers of real Christmas trees should  get carbon credits and the consumer who buys an artificial - fake tree should have to buy carbon credits to make up for their poor environmental choice.

But back to the question, “Are Retail Sales recession proof and slow - down proof?”    I think Christmas trees are pretty much recession proof because of their low relative cost, the strength of the tradition and the fact that when recessions occur, people travel less for Christmas and stay home and make more of buying and decorating a tree. It might appear that the volume of sales of trees by the traditional garden center and local Christmas tree lots is down below the volumes sold in the 1990’s and before, and it is.  However, this number is misleading. The volume was hurt by the “box stores” who began selling trees in a big way, usually between 2,000 and10, 000 trees per store.  They bought lower grade trees and sold them with very little to no mark up as a way to get shoppers into their stores.  They reasoned if one could get the tree buyer in the store they would more than make up the profit one lost on the tree by selling the consumer other items.  This definitely hurt the traditional retailers of trees in a big way to the point that some garden centers do not sell trees at all, though the large majority still do. They now choose to sell the higher quality, premium trees and they stock much bigger sizes, up to fifteen feet. The box stores do not carry the larger trees at all and generally have a very limited selection of sizes overall.  Also, the quality is usually much better at a garden center store.

The second thing that hurt the real Christmas tree sales was the growing popularity of the artificial Christmas tree, produced primarily in China.  Consumers liked the trees because they were supposedly easier to put up and pre-lit; and even though they could cost up to a $1000. They reasoned they would use it year after year and avoid the yearly costs of under $100.  (Note: garden centers now drill trees and have stands where tree can be put up in 30 seconds. Other stands for real trees are also much easier to use.)

Also, what happened was that the artificial trees got better over the years, so like cars they were traded in.  These fake trees also did not last as long as advertised: their color faded, the pre-lit lights quit working and the great smell of a real Christmas tree wasn’t there.  In addition, the consumers who bought the artificial tree still had a desire to buy a real tree – partially for the family fun of choosing the tree, and because the artificial tree is just not the same thing.  The result is that approximately 50 million people use an artificial tree every year and approximately 30 million use a real tree.  Thirty million real trees are sold as compared to approximately 10 million artificial trees (about 20% of total displayed).   Recently there has been a lot of concern raised about the lead in the artificial trees coming from China and the fact that almost 10 million fake or artificial trees are going into landfills each year and they are not biodegradable like real trees, not to mention that we are sending our money to China when we could have kept it here.

www.coolspringsnursery.com

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Gensis  2:15

The environment, the outdoors for most Christmas tree growers is our office and we love it and want to take care of it just as we were created and mandated to do.  We have made great strides in recent years in caring for and being sensitive to the environment.

The first area that we have made great strides in is erosion.  Weeds in Christmas trees are a huge problem because they grow up in the trees and damage the limbs and block out the sunlight.  If not controlled they can grow up to eight feet in the case of Polk Weed(I am thinking this would be a great bio fuel because it produce massive amounts of plant material in a matter of weeks and the seeds are extremely hardy).  Ten years ago growers were using a lot of the herbicides that corn farms were using ,Semizine and Atrazine.  They would strip off all vegetation in the spring opening up the door for soil erosion and sedimentation of streams but by June the weeds in most cases had come back to life because the soil in the mountains is so organic that the herbicide was essentially bound up in the carbon in the organics and would not really penetrate the soil profile and kill the weed seed.  At this point farmers would carefully spray roundup or a much more expensive mix of herbicides(stinger, goal and vantage at a price of $20/acre) without very good results.  Every Christmas Tree Farmer knew and still knows the curse of Genesis 3:17, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your brow you will eat  your food until you return to the ground”.  How depressing!

Salvation came in 2000.  An Avery County Christmas Tree grower  had suspected and Doug Hundley a North State Extension Specialist confirmed and perfected the art of using very low rates of round up 4-8o.z. per acre.  They found that is  would not burn the foliage of Fraser Fir except during the last two weeks of May and the month of June and that weeds and grass could be controlled.  Even better it was found that clover is more resistant to roundup than weeds and grass and that it can survive this 4-8o.z. rate and infact thrive.  So in a few short years we went from living the curse with fields of bind weed and eight foot high Polk weed and the possibility of soil erosion from inappropriate herbicide use to beautiful fields of Clover that contribute up to 60lbs of real nitrogen per year to the growth of the trees.  Cool Springs Nursery ise currently cooperating on three acres of Fraser Fir and doing a very detailed(many replications) experiment with Dr. Ron Gehl, Assistant Professor at N.C. in Soil Science to see if clover can provide enough nitrogen and if not exactly how much nitrogen does a tree need.  This is extremely important in the type of economic atmosphere that we are in where 46-0-0(urea) is priced at $1000/ton.

We love our outdoor office and we are sprucing it up with very low rates of roundup which the EPA states is less toxic than table salt, in other words, if you ate a dish of table salt and a dish of roundup the table salt would kill you before the round up would.

Now we may have a very good chance at also dramatically lowering our fertilizer applications.

Do the deer and animals of the field love these developments?   You bet! If a deer is given a choice between eating a Fraser Fir Christmas Trees or eating clover which do you think he or she is going to do?  Clover is the choice all day long and we have actually seen dramatic examples of where there was extensive damage done to trees by deer but when clover and cover crops were planted that the deer damage was greatly diminished.  The field mice, birds and all other types of wildlife love the natural habitat that fills our Fraser Fir Christmas Tree Fields.

In addition to all this Cool Springs Nursery and a large number of growers practice IPM(integrated pest management) which is a technique where the farmer with a hand lens scouts fields of trees and counts insects and knows by experience and experimentation what levels of insect populations the Fraser Fir Christmas Trees  can tolerate.  When the populations reach danger levels and the predator insects are not doing their job we give the trees some medicine just like the doctor gives the patient.  But just as there is antibiotic resistance in the field of human medicine, insects develop resistance to the medicine we give the trees and so we are very careful to maintain the ecobalance that has been created.  This makes both environmental sense and economic sense.

The bottom line for Cool Springs Nursery and Christmas Tree growers is that we do not just talk about environmentalism theoretically and philosophically in the classroom or on a political campaign.  We in fact are continually outdoors looking for ways to cooperate with and enhance the environment with one of natures most beautiful trees the Fraser Fir.   We pratice envrionmentalism in the real world every day and we love it!

Unbelievable!  That’s what people say when they find out how long it takes to grow a Fraser Fir.

The process is this:

1.  We use 50 foot mechanical lifts to pick the seed on Roan Mountain, the primary Fraser Fir seed source in the world.  We only get to pick once every three or four years because the seed crop often is no good due to frost.

2.  We then send the seed  to Weyerhaeuser Corporation in Washington State where they grow small transplants for one year in the green house.  The the trees are then sent to Kenny Schultz just outside of Seatle where he grows the trees two more years in line-out beds.

3. Finally as a three year old tree it is shipped back to North Carolina after a three year vacation in the west, where we plant the trees on 4.5′ spacing in fields that average about 15 acres.

4.  In the field it usually takes 8 years to grow to a 6-7 foot size and one year for each size higher 7-8, 8-9, etc.  So our 30′ tree under gigantic trees on this website has been in the field 30 years plus 3 years it spent out west as a seedling.

Of course this is only the time spent in the field.  The work is in providing the nutrition, insect control, shaping and shearing and finally weed control.   All this time these trees are adding oxygen, using carbon dioxides, adding water to the atmosphere, controlling erosion and providing habitat.  This is a far cry from lead and plastic trees created in a factory in a faraway country which deplete the environment when they are made and when they are thrown away which surprisingly is very often.  Real Christmas trees are as green as it gets when it comes to manufacturing the perfect Christmas tree.

After a tree has been growing 8 to 15 years and it has finally reached the point that it meets the grade and is ready to be harvested we do several things to the tree.  First we inspect measure and tag the tree.  Then what we call a tipping crew comes through and just barely shapes the tree with a final very light shearing.  Then another crew comes through and gives the tree a final shot of fertilizer to make sure that it stays nice and green until it is cut(trees naturally loose color in the fall) and then finally we spray the tree with an environmentally friendly insecticide called Wisdom to especially make sure their are no cinnarah aphids on the tree that will wake up in a consumers home which will cause a lot of alarm.

Of course their is much more.  We are lining up labor, getting our shipping facility ready and making sure that all the tractors, trucks, balers, elevators, chain saws, computers, trucking companies and orders are in place for customers.  This is something that w work on all year long but it starts in earnst in July and continues until the last tree is shipped and the 2008 Christmas harvest and shipping season is over.

We have been butt pruning our Fraser Fir for several years.  We are putting 8 to 10″ handles on the trees so consumers and retailers can easily display trees.  We started doing this because during our 15 years running retail lots we had so many experiences of selling a beautiful tree and then trimming the bottom limbs off only to find that we had created a huge hole in the tree and had actually ruined it to a large degree. Butt pruning solves this problem.

Many retailers say that they do not want their trees butt pruned because they want to use the greenry to make wreaths.  We empathize and sell precut greenry at a very minimal cost to people who buy our trees.

Currently about 60% of our trees are butt pruned.  If you have a preference let us know.

We all know that fuel cost have almost doubled.  So even though it is painful to report , it is amazing that shipping costs are up an average of 33% and not a 100%.  The other piece of good news is that fuel prices seem to be coming down and we are still four months away from shipping trees.  We can only hope that everything will work out for a great shipping season.

Cool Springs Nursery has several dedicated trucking companies that work with us extensively on getting the best prices to all our customers.  Mark the vice president of Cool Springs has great expertise in shipping and is the director for global logistics for Baxter Corporation at North Cove.  Mark manages 125 employees and ships 120 truck loads of I.V. fluids and pharmaceuticals every day.  We feel this helps us deliver Christmas trees at the lowest cost and on time to our customers.