Cool Springs Grower of N.C. Premium Fraser Fir Christmas Trees says Growers are Practicing Enviromentalist
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!
Tags: Avery County Christmas Tree Grower, biodiesel, Christmas Tree Farmer, Cool Springs, Cool Springs Nursery, deer mice birds habitat, Doug Hundley, environment, erosion, Fraser Fir, Fraser Fir Christmas trees, Fraser Firs, Gensis 2;15, gensis 3:17, Herbicides, NC Christmas trees, NC Fraser Firs, outdoors, polk weed, roundup, salvation, theoretical environmentalism, weeds
