OCR Text |
Show ., SANTA CLAUS GROWS MOST OF HIS C11KISTMAS TREES IN U.S. Sunt iv Oliuis may msUo Ills toys in a workshop nt tho North Toio, but 1 grows his Chrlstnms treos ! right hoiv In tho United States. And growing trees for tho old man 1 with tho long white beard Is big business. This year, tho men who help him will harvest a crop that 1' is expected to top IS million trees. , Most of the evergreens destined j ' for tinsel and bright lights will A come from commercial stocks, and y tho annual Yuletlde demand has A created a really big business. ,' In normal years, Americans cut , from 14 to 16 million trees for the ,1 Christmas observance. The most market ablo conifers are those be- V tween 6 and 10 years in age, and they come from nearly all states except those In tho Great Plains area. Variety Vsed . . . In the Pacific Northwest Douglas Doug-las firs are being harvested for the season; in the Great Lakes area and Northeast firs, balsam ' " and spruce are being cut; in most -i of the rest of the nation trees are being selected from the many species of pines long leaf, loblolly, lob-lolly, sugar, white, Torrey, Monterey, Monte-rey, jack, short leaf and others. Even Canada is cutting trees for the American market. And soon the tightly bundled evergreens, one to eight in a bundle, will be mov-" mov-" Lng by trainloads to the cities. Last year G. R. Kirk company, which operates on a nationwide basis, shipped 1,110 carloads of trees from the Pacific Northwest to states west of the Mississippi, while supplying its eastern customers cus-tomers with another 1,500 carloads car-loads from a Canadian source. Farmers in two northwestern Montana Mon-tana counties recently sold more than a half million dollars worth of trees. It has became an important im-portant source of their annual income. in-come. Christmas trees are not only big business, but also an old business. ' In Seattle, a comparatively young city by eastern standards, the J. j Hofert company is busily filling ! , orders for its 67th consecutive sea- ! son. Other smaller firms trace i V, j their beginning back more than a ! hundred years and amateurs have Vj been cutting their own for up- N wards of three centuries. The tradition that has made , Santa Claus a tree-harvester also has made the old saint a first class forester. Supplying the vast Christ mas demand over the years has b-e--i come more and more a matter of growing trees for this particular ot. Species, age and size have I factors closely linked wT of ? th0re Was a dager of forest depletion resulting from So Santa has applied forestry to his job and become what woods-thmkmg woods-thmkmg fo,ks call a "tree farm- I!8 PCrS' Who have fo1" lotved him into silviculture, have tree-Krowing success stories to tell. One of the best comes from helper James L. Woodbury of Morrill, Maine. Woodbury farms 130 acres, of which he has devoted 10 to .the holiday product. For some time, he has shipped one and a half boxcars box-cars full of trees each year. Soon he expects to be shipping two cars. He says he can go on raising Christmas trees indefinitely and that he makes more money per acre from his tree patch than from any other part of his farm. The soil of Woodbury's 10-acre tree farm is the poorest on his place, yet it has paid him as much as $300 in a season and this year is expected to top that figure. In 1929, Woodbury cleared the 10-acre 10-acre tract for pasture. But the firs came back and five years later he harvested his first cror of Christmas trees. When he discovered discov-ered that the trees grew faster than he could cut them, he resigned re-signed himself and ever since has been applying good forestry to his Christmas tree patch to produce increased growth. Probably the nation's biggest Christmas tree producing area per acre is in Mason county in the State of Washington, which cuts and ships in the neighborhood of a million trees each year. But even with this heavy annual harvest, har-vest, the tree-,growing lands are ready after 12 months with another an-other crop of evergreens. About a dozen operators gather their trees in Mason county, and the management manage-ment plans they apply to their forests assure them of Christmas trees to cut, on a sustained yield basis, forever. Borrowing a page from forest industries which have inaugurated the nationwide tree farm program, Santa is eating his cake and keeping keep-ing it too. He is producing his trees scientifically, with an eye on the future. While Santa himself has not been awarded a certificate of enrollment with the tree farmers farm-ers of America, a fair percentage of the 15 million acres of forest land now operated under strict fore Christmas. But no stock quotation quo-tation on Wall Street can fall as fast as Yule tree values on Christmas Christ-mas morning. j tree farm management will pro-, duce trees for the Christmas market. mar-ket. On these woodlands, where trees are grown like crops for commercial com-mercial uses, Christmas cuttings will be largely thinnings the removal re-moval of selected trees to permit accelerated growth among those remaining. Nineteen states are active in this movement with the strong possibility pos-sibility that the white-bearded spirit of Christmas may be given a new role as patron saint of the nation's major tree-growing effort. ef-fort. In one additional respect, Christmas Christ-mas trees this year are expected to follow the trend of the times with higher prices. Christmas morning 1946 found many dealers with unsold un-sold stocks and this year's orders have been more conservative than last year's estimates. Fewer trees usually mean higher prices, dealers deal-ers declare, and cite the price of $35 asked and paid for a tree in Manhattan one year, when alast minute shortage developed. However the dealers may figure it, America's woodlands have the trees. And Santa's helpers are knee-deep in their busiest season with the deadline set at Christmas eve. Trees may be big business and young firs and spruce may be dollars in the bank the night be- |