O Christmas Tree! : Months of Toil Shape December Boughs, County Growers Say

One of the customers at the Monterey pine tree farm surveyed all the people who were shelling out $20, $30 and more for their favorite, cut-your-own Christmas tree.

“This place must be a gold mine,” he said to no one in particular. “You plant a tree, you water it and you sell it. I think I could handle that.”

The remark was later related to Gertrude Jensen, owner of another farm, called “Tree World.” She shook her head, laughing.

“You tell him to come out here with me one day in the summer when it’s 100 degrees and I’ve got to prune all these trees,” she said, her arm sweeping over the eight acres of Christmas tree plantings.

“It may look great out here now. Everyone’s happy and in a good mood, buying their trees. We have lots of fun for one month. But the other 11 are hard work.”

It’s harvest time for San Diego County’s crop of Monterey pines. Before the season comes to an abrupt halt on Dec. 24, the county’s 15 or so Christmas tree growers will have grossed an estimated $1.8 million in retail and wholesale tree sales off their total of 200 acres.

Of all the popular, so-called Christmas trees--the Douglas, silver, white and noble firs and the Scotch and Monterey pines--only the Monterey pine is grown in San Diego County because it can best cope with the county’s heat and relatively sparse rainfall.

Once the crop is harvested and the growers’ entire annual income is pocketed over the course of just four weeks, the drudgery and cost of raising Christmas trees will resume.

There will be new seedlings to plant, irrigation lines to repair, fertilizer to be spread, moths to be sprayed, weeds to be cultivated and trees to be pruned. And pruned. And pruned.

Indeed, the Monterey pines would not be Christmas trees at all were it not for the hours spent over them with clippers and machetes, giving them the classic conical shape so desired by customers. Left to grow of its own accord, the Monterey pine would be a bushy tree without a distinctive shape. Or it could be trained as a glorious shade tree over the course of 10 or 15 years, with six or eight feet of bare trunk branching out into a crown of long pine needles.

San Diego County’s growers--from Bonita and Jamul in the south to Fallbrook in the north--produce the fourth-largest crop of Christmas trees among all of California’s counties (behind San Mateo, Los Angeles and Orange counties). Area growers range from small mom-and-pop operations, where a few acres of trees behind the house provide a hobby and maybe some extra cash, to full-fledged businesses involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in local retail and out-of-state wholesale sales.

The largest growers in San Diego County are Charlie and Sandy Jancic, who own and operate the four Pinery Tree Farms.

Jancic studied forestry as a college student, and naively thought that operating a Christmas tree farm for a few months out of the year would be a fun and easy way to make a living. Later, he was hired as an agricultural biologist for the San Diego County Department of Agriculture, but decided to begin Christmas tree farming on the side anyway.

He leased a three-acre parcel next to Gillespie Field in El Cajon--property that could not be developed because it was part of the airport’s “clear zone”--and planted his first crop of trees in early 1970. He began selling the first four-footers in December, 1972.

Every year he added a few more acres until he eventually left his job with the Department of Agriculture and made Christmas trees his full-time career. Today, he and his wife own a 20-acre farm at Lakeside, and they lease the land for the other farms: 10 acres next to Gillespie Field, seven acres at Sweetwater Regional Park in Bonita, and 90 acres owned by the City of San Diego on the shore of Lake Hodges near Escondido.

Jancic’s Christmas tree operation may well be the most productive in the county. He says he grows as many as 2,500 trees to the acre, while other farmers usually do not plant more than 1,500 to the acre, and sometimes less.

A Monterey pine will grow about two feet its first year, and about a foot a year thereafter, so most six-footers were planted five years ago. Because most customers want trees that are at least five, if not six, feet tall, and because the growers replant annually, about 20% of the farm’s trees are sold every December. Some growers send away for seedlings in January, at a cost of 5 cents to 25 cents each, while other growers, including Jancic, produce their own seedlings.

The local pines are usually pruned three times a year--a couple of times during the summer, when the tree grows the fastest, and usually at least once in the fall, to give it its final shape before a few more weeks of growth in advance of the sales season. Jancic says he prunes his trees six times a year; in contrast, William Ellis, who operates the “Uncle Scrooge” tree farm in Valley Center, says he prunes his only once.

Ellis purchased his 17-acre farm four years ago and has focused his attention more on gourmet vegetables the likes of ornamental kale (a fancy cabbage with a red center) than the four acres of Monterey pines that had been planted by the previous owner. He doesn’t weed around the Christmas trees; he watered them only once this past summer, and pruned them just once. All the trees sell for the same price, $22.

Down the road is Lou Heck, who owns Holiday Pines--which was established in the 1950s and is said by Heck to be the oldest Christmas tree farm in San Diego County. He purchased the three-acre farm from his in-laws three years ago, and he figures on selling 700 trees this year.

“This place is probably costing me more money than it makes me,” said Heck, who is retired from the Navy. “I always wanted to own this place, but now that I’ve got it I realize how hard it is to keep the weeds down. I found out what ‘Hoe! Hoe! Hoe!’ really means. I think the only way I’m going to make any money is to subdivide the property and put houses in here.”

Jensen, whose Tree World is the third of the three tree farms in a row on Valley Center Road, purchased her eight-acre spread in 1972 and began selling the first trees in 1975.

“When we moved to California from Utah, my (pre-cut) tree was so dry that I had to take it down before Christmas,” she complained. “That’s when my husband said we ought to grow our own trees.”

Jensen does not plant her trees as close together as she could and figures on selling 1,000 trees this year. The farm is landscaped with climbing boulders for children and picnic tables “for the people who decide to make it a day when they come out here.”

She mothers her trees, even to the point of pulling dead brown needles (a natural occurrence, and not a sign that the tree is drying out) from trees that already are sold.

A fresh-cut tree should last several weeks, if not a couple of months, as long as it is well watered (a six-foot tree might still consume as much as a gallon of water daily during the first week after it is cut) and not put near a heat vent or fireplace, local growers say.

Before the tree is put in its holding container, the bottom half-inch or so of the trunk should again be cut off because sap would have sealed the trunk at the point of the initial cut, blocking the flow of water into the tree.

Aside from the land, the greatest expense of operating a tree farm may be the cost of imported water. Heck’s Holiday Pines farm, for instance, will drink up $3,000 in water bills this year, he said. Cost of labor varies, depending on whether the owner does the work himself or hires migrant farm workers or others to trim the trees. If tip moths appear and begin burrowing into the branches, eventually killing the entire tree, the farm must be sprayed. And there is the cost of seasonal labor (sales help in December, for instance) and the loss in stolen or damaged, unsaleable trees.

On top of that, there is the nuisance--or thrill, depending on the farmer’s point of view--of getting dirty for the sake of the holiday spirit.

Tom Linley, the previous owner of Holiday Pines, remarked: “It would be raining and people would want their tree right then, so I’d get down in the mud and wonder why the hell I was doing this. But then, it’s nice to see the same families year after year, and their kids getting bigger and always coming out to get the tree.”

Local growers say they are surprised not by how picky some customers are in looking for the perfect tree, but how they will settle on a flawed tree to serve as a centerpiece of their Christmas festivities.

“I guess we’re more particular than the customer,” Jancic said. “We see customers walking out of here with trees that we didn’t think were saleable. People who buy pre-cut trees in front of supermarkets are so picky, I guess they think Christmas trees are pushed out of a press. But at tree farms like these, people are more willing to accept nature’s imperfections.”

Linley added, “Some people may not realize what a nice tree they’ve got until they get it home and set it up. It’s like having a child--it may not be the greatest, but it’s yours.”