Covington, GA |

Come November and December, this Christmas tree farm will be bustling with people searching for the perfect tree for their home. However, what most don’t realize is the amount of time and energy that goes into growing them – a process that, according to Owner Chuck Berry, takes several years.

“When most people think of a Christmas tree farm, they just think of it at Christmas time. November and December are fun months and then after Christmas, the work begins. It’s just like any other crop; you have to plant it, you have to maintain it, and it takes, probably about five years for these trees behind us to make mature age where they’re ready for cutting. So, today we’re planting trees, we try to do that in January and February, try to get them in the ground and get them established before the drier months come. So, we’ll plant about thirty-five hundred this year, about four different varieties, and it takes them anywhere from four to six years to mature,” says Chuck Berry, Owner of Berry’s Tree Farm.

The process, which you can see here, is a methodical one, which Berry says helps them better maintain the trees and their farm, as each crop is carefully measured and spaced out.

“As you can see behind me, the trees are almost in straight rows and that’s just basically for maintenance purposes. We plant everything on an eight foot square, so you’ve got an eight foot row both ways. It just makes it look more uniform; easier to maintain with the tractor. We plant everything basically like a crop. Some farms might go back in between big trees and plant little trees; we plant everything the same size, so we push up stumps with the loader, clean the field, plow the field. It’s like planting corn or cotton, just we don’t get corn or cotton this year; we’ve got to wait five or six years for it to produce a Christmas tree,” says Berry.

As you can see, other than actually clearing the land, they do everything by hand rather than with machines, which Berry says helps them grow a better product.

“We plant everything by hand. I mentioned that we plan on eight foot squares, we don’t plant with a machine. We just get a better product if we can manually dig the holes. It looks like a daunting task, but with a good crew and good weather, we can plant close to two thousand trees in a day. Yes, we’re digging them by hand with hole diggers, but the land is prepared, and it doesn’t take much to dig a hole big enough to put a gallon pot in. So, it just pays dividends later on when everything’s in straight rows and we’ve actually put it in the ground one at the time,” says Berry.

According to Berry, once they get the trees in the ground, the hard part is out of the way, as he says Christmas trees are generally low maintenance.

“They pretty much hold their own once we get them planted as long as we’ve got ample rainfall in the Spring, then they do good. Most of the trees, drought doesn’t affect them very much. Most of the time they just go into a dormant stage. They don’t die, but you don’t get any growth. So, once these trees are planted, outside of maintaining with trimming or cutting grass, or spraying fungicide, once the stakes are there and they’re tied, they’re ready to go. So, it takes a lot of work, but to say that they’re high maintenance is probably not the case. The biggest thing to make a Christmas tree, a Christmas tree is the trimming. If we didn’t trim them twice a year, they would basically just look like an ornamental bush. It takes that trimming to make that shape and also make them thicker. So the more you trim, the thicker they get,” says Berry.

By: John Holcomb