Tag Archives: rural farming

The Hidden Work Behind Growing the Perfect Christmas Tree | Inside Berry’s Tree Farm

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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

Rising from the Ashes: Livestock Exhibitors Rebuild After Devastating Barn Fire

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Perry, GA |

Last Winter, these livestock exhibitors’ lives were drastically changed, as their school’s barn burned down, taking their animals and months of hard work, time, and energy along with it. It was a moment that can only be described as devastating, however, now just over a year later, they’ve rebounded, put in the work, and are competing at the show they missed last year.

“It burnt down just exactly two weeks before Perry. So, we had went in October and we kind of got to see that side of things, but it was very sad to get to see your animal grow, and you would put so much time and effort into it, and you were working up to this point. And then for you not to be able to go through with it, and then you got to watch everybody still go and compete without you; it was definitely sad, and you kind of just felt let down, like all you had done was kind of to waste, but definitely this year has been nice to get back in the swing of things, and I’ve been able to learn from it that you can still move on, you can still work better this next year, and it’s gonna be okay,” says Kate Bearden, Southeast Whitfield Livestock Exhibitor.

This year, their show team is significantly smaller, as only a handful were able to house their animals at their homes, which of course, as Bearden says, presented new challenges.

“It definitely has impacted us since it’s burnt down, because you’re not able to have as big of a show team. It’s nice whenever you have the convenience of sharing the stands and the blowers at the school. But once it burnt and it’s at you’re at your house, you don’t have all those things at your access and you’re not able to have as many members, because a lot of the kids rely on the school to provide for the things that they need,” says Bearden.

Though the incident was no doubt a tragedy, the team turned it into an opportunity – one that demonstrates passion, resilience, and determination, especially when you have a great support system.

“It doesn’t matter whether we have a barn at the school. It doesn’t matter whether our group’s small or big, we’re still able to compete. We’re still able to do good and be able to come to Perry. I still was able to work with my goat at my house. I was able to send pictures back and forth to my ag teachers, and they were still able to give me input, even though it wasn’t in person. They were still able to say, ‘hey, you should brace it this way. You need to work with walking it and here’s just a few tips.” So I was able to move past whether the barn was there or not,” says Bearden.

“Our kids are tough, and their parents are tough, and their families are tough, and they work hard. And so, obviously when that happened, it took some time to grieve and to look back and reflect, but these students that decided to take that adversity and learn from it. And so, they decided, I’m not going to let something that frankly, they can’t control hold them down. So, they decided we’re going to house our animals at home. We’re still going to work hard, and we’re going to do what we love to do and that’s show livestock. And essentially, I think that comes back full circle with exactly why we do this, exactly why our students show livestock. They show livestock to learn how to handle adversity, to work hard and work with one another to get through issues that might occur,” Logan Hunter, Agriculture Teacher at Southeast Whitfield High School.

By: John Holcomb