Ireland

Christmas trees ‘from forest to front door’: Growers foresee bumper season after top growing conditions

Things are very hectic at the moment for those supplying real Christmas trees, and one supplier we spoke to has the Santa-like task of getting about 20,000 of them to market

Theo Lambton of firtree.ie at the Rathcon Christmas Tree Farm, Grangecon, Wicklow. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

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Conor Pope
Sat Dec 2 2023 - 06:00

Christy Kavanagh could just as easily be called Christmas Kavanagh, as the Wicklow farmer will be run off his feet in the days ahead supplying homes across Ireland with the most festive of centrepieces.

He was born into the business of Christmas trees and inherited a 100-acre farm first set up by his parents in 1952. This year he will supply about 20,000 trees to homes and retailers all over the country and also in the UK.

Ahead of the busiest days of his year, he is upbeat about how things have been shaping up. “This year has been very good,” he says. “It was an excellent year for our Christmas trees because there was adequate moisture, adequate sunlight, and it was warm – so we had a very long growing season.”

The weather has been on his side, and so too has Brexit of all things, as that big change has made it harder for retailers in the UK to source trees in countries such as Denmark and Germany.

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“Things are looking very good and there are a lot of new people coming in buying their first trees from us,” he told The Irish Times.

“At Cop27 last year, [Green Party leader] Eamon Ryan said we all need to be more planet-conscious, and the people coming in for the first time are just that – more planet-conscious.”

[ US has been warned that Christmas trees might not be so easy to buy this year ]

Kavanagh is quick to highlight the many problems of artificial Christmas trees, which are still found in as many as half of Irish homes. He says it is not just their larger carbon footprints and the fact that they produce no oxygen, as, according to an Bord Bia, a hectare of real trees produces about 90 tons of oxygen over 10 years of growing. “They [artificial trees] cannot be recycled in this country, so always end up in landfill,” he said.

The price of the trees he sells depends on “whether you are buying a Lada or a Rolls-Royce, but it should be somewhere between €8 and €12 a foot”, with a typical household tree stretching to about a six or seven feet.

The Nordman Fir is the big seller now, having supplanted the Noble in recent years. “They are greener and bushier, while the Nobles are more layered,” he says.

As for the timings, while people are erecting the trees earlier now than ever before, the week ahead will be “savage” and by far the busiest days of his season.

It is, he suggested “difficult to say” how long a tree should last, because so many homes are so well heated nowadays. “At the minute you have people going around their houses in winter in their bikinis, so that is a bit tricky all right.”

His best advice is to put a tray of water underneath the tree and fill it regularly, and to erect it as far from radiators as possible.

[ The men who delivered my tree were the absolute heads off the Wet Bandits from Home Alone ]

While Kavanagh has been in the Christmas tree game for a long time, Theo Lambton is a relative newbie.

“The first year that I was involved in Christmas trees would have been 10 years ago. I’d done two years of harvesting in Wicklow and I took my wages and bought 50 Christmas trees and sold them in my home town of Birr,” he recalls. “It was a quick earner for me to get me over the Christmas period.”

The success of his pop-up tree shop prompted him to step up his festive efforts the following year. “Me and a friend borrowed a 6ft4 trailer and a Jeep, and hand made flyers with little Jingle Bell tassels on them, and we went door to door asking if people might be interested in getting a tree.”

This year, over the next two or three weeks, he will deliver in excess of 1,000 trees around the Dublin area.

Is delivering something as important as a tree a big responsibility? “It just takes a lot of time working with Christmas trees, and we get the best-quality ones we can and allow customers to pick the shape and present them with the tree we believe is the best option for them. And if it is not perfect, we will have more options in the van or will happily come back again, so essentially we’re bringing the forest to their front door. If someone is paying a lot of money – like €120 or €200 for a Christmas tree – it should be right.”

Christmas