Many people like to get an early start preparing for Christmas, but Preston Fleming is looking farther ahead than most everybody else.
This spring and summer, he’s making plans for Christmas 2030. And even Christmas 2036.
That’s when the evergreen trees that he’s planting now on Fleming Farms in Derry Township will be ready to be cut down and decorated for those future holidays.
Little trees that are now 4 or 5 years old will be ready in another seven or eight years, and the seeds planted this season will take 11 to 13 years until they’re ready. Until then, they have to be tended to in the seed beds and in the fields that have to be weeded and fertilized. Then there’s all that shearing to keep them growing in the perfect conical shapes that customers expect.
It’s a year-round endeavor with the work picking up now when few people are thinking about Santa Claus.
Preston has been doing this for more than two decades, beginning on relatives’ farms in Indiana County.
“I was 12 or 13 when I started working around the trees,” he said. “I grew up right up the road from my cousins and I worked after school and on weekends and all summer. Now I have my own farms.”
There are seven farms, including one in Punxsutawney and the one in Derry Township near New Alexandria. The rest are in Indiana County, all totaling nearly 200 acres.
Fleming in 2020 bought the one in Derry Township from his cousins JD and Cindy Fleming.
“I grew up working for them and their father Roy and brother Randy, who had close to 30-some farms throughout Indiana and surrounding counties,” he said. “JD’s father Roy started it in 1945 and the main farm was in Indiana. This one near New Alexandria has been a tree farm for about 30 years, and it’s a choose and cut farm.”
During the holiday season, customers go out into the fields to pick their own trees and cut them down with hand saws that are provided. Or a staff member can do that for them.
The pre-holiday weekends after Thanksgiving and before Christmas feature traditional festivities with hot chocolate, fires and s’mores, kettle corn, games, crafts, hay rides, horse drawn wagon rides and a petting zoo. And of course, Santa Claus is there.
“People come as families and bring the kids,” Fleming said. “The kids just love it.”
There’s not only the choose and cut aspect, but he also raises trees that are cut and sold to other outlets.
“I like to supply fire departments and Boy Scouts for fundraisers, and I like to supply them to farm markets and other greenhouses,” he said. “I supply trees for Saltsburg’s light up night, and I’ve sold some to Ligonier the last couple of years and Latrobe. I also sold some through a broker.”
Some of the little trees, like the ones being planted now, come from other growers’ nurseries, and he also starts some of his own. Seeds like from the Fraser fir are mixed with sand and water to keep them moist before being planted in a seed bed to grow for two or three years. Then the little trees are staked out and transplanted for another two years. They are four or five years old when they are dug out and transplanted in the field where they’ll grow for another seven or eight years. It will be 11 to 13 years before the seeds that are started this year become someone’s Christmas tree.
Meanwhile, they have to be fertilized, the space around them weeded and mowed, and they need to be treated for insect infestations and fungal diseases.
“We have to go through the Fraser firs to pick off all the cones because the cones suck so much energy from the tree’s growth,” Fleming said. “Some of them have 200 to 300 cones on them. That’s very labor intense and it takes a long time. Then we start shearing.”
Deer, he added, are the biggest problem.
“As soon as it starts snowing and the deer have nothing else to eat except these nice little trees, they’ll eat them down to just a stick,” he said. “I just put a 7-foot high woven wire fence around the 70 acres with a strand of wire on the top to keep them out.”
Source: dailycourier.com
Photo Credit: istock-georgeclerk
Categories: Indiana, Crops