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Fraser Fir Christmas trees were hurt by frost this May. Fortunately the damage was not everywhere; in fact, it was spotty. Most trees will recover but some of the smaller trees may be set back several years because the damage was more extensive, in that a larger portion of the tree was damaged. Fortunately this was not anywhere near the magnitude of damage that almost all growers in western North Carolina experienced in 2002.
Cool Springs Nursery was fortunately in an area where we experienced no damage. We are looking forward to a great 2009 season of Christmas trees.
Cool Springs Nursery first began planting trees in 1981. We have learned a lot over the last twenty-some years and we love helping people grow and sell quality Fraser Fir Christmas trees. We have had experience with a retail tree lot for many years but don’t currently run one. We sell trees wholesale and have a Choose and Cut retail business now. We sell to nursery centers and other retailers as well as to various organizations for fundraisers.
Ask any question here and we will answer it or refer you to someone we think can better answer your question(s).
We just counted the number of cones on a single ten- foot Fraser Fir Christmas tree. How many do you think there were on one tree?
We counted 450 cones and I kid you not! In this one particular field of 2000 8′-12′ trees, it took 15 workers 3 days to pick the cones off the trees. This is a yearly chore that the older, bigger trees present us with each and every spring. This spring the crop of cones was huge.
There has been a lot of speculation as to what stimulates cone production in Fraser Fir. I have read that the trees alternate years between light and heavy crops. Environmental conditions, drought, bad soil, bad nutrition also seem to stimulate cone production. The tree gets the message that it might not survive so it better do everything it can to reproduce. I do not know exactly what the psychology of the trees was this year or what the cone production says about their mental state. Maybe they felt the economic crisis, recession and the pending disaster coming and they responded in kind but it has been a lot of work cleaning up their panic. We did have a harder winter than in recent years, with more snow and colder weather. That is predicted again for this winter, so we can check that theory out next spring.
One of the cone questions we ask every year at this time is, “How did the cones on Roan Mountain do? Are there a lot of cones? Did the cones get frozen out by a late freeze?” This year we had several nights in mid - May where the temperature got down to 27 degrees at my home, which is at 3600’ elevation. The temperature could easily have been 10 degrees lower in the Fraser Fir stands and groves on top of Roan Mountain, at 6,000’ in elevation. But then, because of the elevation there, the trees are delayed in their growth and are not at a vulnerable stage of growth. Bottom line is that I do not know how the cones on Roan Mountain fared this past winter, but there is a good possibility that there will be a huge crop of seed that will be ripe to pick come September 1.
In the meantime, if you are growing Fraser Fir trees, do not forget to pick your cones. They inhibit the development of Fraser Fir foliage and must be picked if you want to produce a top quality tree.
Virgin forests of Hemlock trees, up to 500 years old, have died. One was in my back yard.In the seventies, I did an Eagle Scout project to maintain the health of another grove in the area, the Hemlock Hill Giants. These stands are very rare on the East Coast because most of these giants were cut in the early nineteen hundreds, from 1900 to 1935. Those trees that survived the cuttings at the turn of the last century were in isolated stands and towered majestically over the other trees around them. They had thrived since 1500 during the era when Columbus found the Americas. Since then, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution have come and gone and numerous wars, including the Revolutionary and the Civil wars, have been fought in the shadow of these trees.
In my own backyard, over the last ten years, these gentle giants have died and developers have given them their final death blow, putting them out of their misery. Hemlock Hill in Banner Elk has not been developed still sports standing, but dead, gigantic Hemlock trees, five feet plus across from this same era. Although standing, they are all dead or close to it. All this is thanks to the Hemlock woolly adelgid which has been devastating to the Hemlock in the USA. This is a bug that came to United States, first to the Pacific Northwest in the 1920’s from Asia; it traveled east and was introduced to the Northeast in the 1950’s. Closer to western North Carolina, the woolly adelgid was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1967.It is an insect which feeds on the fluid in the hemlocks; its egg sacs look like the tips of cotton swabs, clinging to the underside of the branches of the hemlock trees. It devastates and defoliates the trees. It has spread at a rate of about 20 miles per year. It takes no hostages and kills every hemlock in its path unless the tree is treated and the treatments are hard and usually unsuccessfully applied to these giant trees of the East Coast.
Fraser Fir on the other hand has a brighter future. Large stands of native Fraser Fir exist on Mount Rogers and in the southern North Carolina mountains. Roan Mountain has the largest stand of Fraser Fir trees and is the largest seed source for Fraser in the world. It sits on the North Carolina- Tennessee state line and is bisected by one of the most beautiful sections of the Appalachian Trail, according to National Geographic. These trees are amazingly healthy compared to the Hemlocks even though they too are being attacked by a different Adelgid, the Balsam Woolly Adeglid, which was imported from Europe. There are trees dying here and there; it is hard to tell the exact cause of death but their tops are straight and their foliage is green. The first major sign of damage from Balsam Wooly Adelgid is a crooked top. Also, there are hundreds of thousands of healthy Fraser Fir trees producing cones, which we pick with cherry pickers from the access roads. We used to drag ladders through these groves and climb the trees however, this is now prohibited by the forest service because the trees were being damaged. I have climbed Frasers that were 70 feet high; it is great fun to be in a mature Fraser Fir, whose seedlings we work so intensively with over several years to produce Christmas trees. The bottom line is that Frasers though threatened are surviving; the young trees on the forest floor are numerous and taking the place of any trees that go down. It looks like Frasers will survive the Balsam adelgid, acid rain, ozone and anything else that is out there currently, whereas the Hemlock is going down for the count unless they are sprayed and treated intensively.
I personally mourn the demise of the hemlock; what a great and beautiful tree. It is very sad and ranks in terms of tragedy right in there with the vanishing of the American Chestnut tree in the early years of the 2oth century; the American Chestnut had developed a blight imported from Asia. At some point a disease- resistant chestnut could reach maturity and a generation or two from now could witness this. Foundations are working on making this happen. For the Hemlock, it will take seven or eight human generations before we could appreciate the majesty of a mature hemlock again; we have got a long wait.
Balsam Woolly Adelgid, Twig Aphid and Spider Mites are the great foes of the Fraser Fir.
·Balsam Woolly Adelgid, an insect imported from Europe, cuts off the water supply to the tree and will literally kill a Fraser Fir over a long period of time, but even worse, it can ruin the possibility of selling it in a s little as a year.
·Twig Aphid attacks the tree in the spring, as the buds are breaking. It will stop the bud from growing a branch in many cases which makes the tree unsightly and, of course, unfit for sale.
·Spider Mites devastate the foliage and will turn a tree yellow in a short period of time. Yes, it will again ruin the crop if it occurs at harvest.
For a long time we used a very harsh and difficult to use chemical called Di-Syston for the twig aphid and red spider. We used Lindane, Assanna and agricultural oil for the Balsam Woolly Adelgid. Fortunately, if we got it right, we would hopefully only have to treat the Woolly Adelgid once in seven years. We could get away with this because of our intensive use of scouting and looking for bugs, and by determining an acceptable level before treating. The twig aphids and red spiders had to be treated once a year, in the spring immediately before the buds broke, which was very difficult because we had to wait for the aphids to hatch and then we had only a week or two to treat before the twig entered the cones where they could hide and re-attack the tree. This was especially difficult to do when you had hundreds of acres of trees. Bottom line was that spring treatment was a problem because of the short window and the lack of good weather here in the northern mountains of North Carolina.
Finally, a new solution which could be used effectively against all of these pests. They can be slain relatively easily by spraying Wisdom and Dimethylate in the fall during August, September or October. This was accidentally discovered by tree farmers when they were spraying Wisdom for Woolly Adelgid in the fall; then the details were validated by North Carolina Agricultural Extension Agency. This was a very exciting breakthrough for those of us who have been involved in this fight for a long long time and relatively boring for those of you who have never faced this foe. For those who know, let’s celebrate!
For many generations, the Christmas tree has been associated with a long tradition of joy and Christmas cheer, of holiday spirit and religious celebration. However we live in a fast moving society which wants everything instantaneously, which chooses fast food over home - cooked family meals and which has begun, in some circles, to view Christmas trees as too much trouble and too messy. A growing number of consumers are skipping the tradition of having a tree altogether or opting for a fake tree.
Every time Christmas tree growers have come together to show the public the wonder, beauty and joy of having a real Christmas tree in their home, the sales have gone up dramatically. When sales go up, demand goes up and prices go up and the grower eventually gets back much more than what was invested in doing a national campaign.
There is a feeling that growers are approaching a tipping point and must make their case and win the hearts of future consumers if their industry is going to grow in the future. These growers have come together in a powerful way and are very close to agreeing to a check-off program where growers will be assessed for each tree grown in order to win the battle for the hearts of consumers. The check-off program has been extremely successful in growing the market of every commodity group that has used it.
Cool Springs Nursery is very much for the program; we feel that there is strength in numbers and that we will have a much brighter future with a national program. Cool Springs Nursery also hopes that any growers who are currently not for the program will take a look at the bigger picture. We need a National Marketing Campaign that will tell our story to the public. We have a great product that is, to a large degree, a living sculpture and a powerful symbol of love and joy. We cannot let this die.
It’s that time of the year! We have begun the fertilization process on our trees this week due to the good weather and optimal conditions. This week we were spreading Nitrogen in order to continue bringing you the greenest, healthiest trees possible.
Here are a few short clips of our field manager, Phil, spreading Nitrogen with our state-of-the-art fertilization machinery.
“Perfect Storm Hits Fertilizer Market, Fertilizer prices down by 50%”
This is the big news of March 2009. Since last September, wholesale prices of fertilizers have declined dramatically. In September, fertecon (www.fertecon.com) reported that wholesale prices of anhydrous ammonia at the Gulf of Mexico were over $800 per ton. In early January, anhydrous ammonia prices were below $200 per ton. Similarly, diammonium phosphate (DAP) at the Gulf was over $1,000 per ton in September and about $350 per ton in early January.
What happened? How did wholesale prices fall to a price that was only 25% to 30% of what they were a year earlier? What happened, of course, was an economic crisis that has pushed down commodity prices, including fertilizer and has tightened credit markets to the point that South America could not purchase fertilizer in many cases. Also because of the high prices, use of certain fertilizers was down 50% last year, building up inventories in the fertilizer pipeline which also helped to push down prices. So currently we have prices which are lower, much, much lower than a just one year ago.
But what about the future? Economic and credit problems will hold back the price somewhat but there are two factors that could push up fertilizer prices in the future. First, fertilizer costs for planting corn and soybeans will be much lower and this may stimulate farmers to plant much more and as a result push up a demand for fertilizer. Second, Russia and the Ukraine are making moves to cut back the supply of natural gas to Europe. If this happens, there is a good chance that natural gas prices and thus nitrogen prices will go up.
In summary, things are bad economically now and this has driven down the fertilizer prices to where they were two years ago. But there is definite upside risk that the storm will fade, and that additionally, new factors such as government action in the carbon area, will result in driving prices higher.
How does this effect growing North Carolina Fraser Fir Christmas trees? It is a good time to try to meet your phosphorus needs, don’t forget to incorporate the fertilizer. Unfortunately potash is still at an all time high. Don’t give up on trying to meet your nitrogen needs with clover and other nitrogen - fixing ground cover. Happy Spring planting.
