People who are particular about their Christmas tree or wreaths may find the holiday pickings a little slimmer this year.
It’s been more difficult for tree sellers to get full orders of trees from farms for a couple of reasons: In New England, the wet weather made harvesting difficult for some farms and nationally, the Great Recession put many growers out of business, leading to a skimpy supply since it takes eight to 10 years to grow a tree.
Schoodacs Coffee House in Warner is selling trees for the first time this year. Owner Darryl Parker said he started late and nearly wasn’t able to get any trees.
He just happened to call Leblanc’s Christmas Tree Farm in Plymouth to find that they had an order canceled, so he was able to buy those.
“It was really serendipitous,” he said.
Even then, his order was about 35 percent less than he wanted because the equipment to cut the trees couldn’t get to all of them, the ground was too wet, he said.
Though the summer started off drier than average, August and September were exceptionally rainy in New Hampshire.
Schoodacs will be selling trees during its normal business hours – daily 6:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. – until they run out.
Further north, it’s a different kind of precipitation causing problems.
A spring frost damaged trees at some farms in Nova Scotia, Canada, choking off some supply in the Northeast, the Associated Press reported. Some Canadian farms in New Brunswick are buried under snow from recent storms, making it difficult for them to get trees onto trucks for shipment.
“In nine years selling trees, we’ve never had this much snow this early,” said Matt Langlois of Langlois Family Tree Farm in Burke, Vt.
Langlois said his farm, which is less than 30 miles from the Canadian border, already has about a foot to 14 inches of snow on the ground.
While it’s good for the trees to have cold weather and moisture in the ground, it makes getting them out difficult.
“I had to plow out much of my plantation,” Langlois said, so his trucks and baler could access the trees.
Every tree had to have its trunk dug out of the snow so it could be cut at ground level.
Langlois has a small farm; everything he grows is sold in his hometown of Penacook next to the pharmacy owned by his mother and run by his sisters. He said he’s fortunate that he had 11 friends come last weekend to help with cutting and packing the trees.
His tree lot will be open Friday in Penacook Village in the lot next to Fox Ace Hardware. Hours will be Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
“Its a tradition,” Langlois said. “Instead of Black Friday shopping, they go Christmas tree shopping.”
In Henniker, at Forster’s Tree Farm, the weather hasn’t hampered tree collection, but impacted some of its other offerings.
The farm is on a hill, so water was able to drain. Now there is snow on the ground, but not so much that the trees are unreachable, said Stephan Forster.
“It looks beautiful here,” Forster said of the snow-covered farm.
However, Forster has a shortage with wreaths and garlands, which are made from trimming of Balsam fir, indigenous to more northern areas of New Hampshire and into Canada.
Forster said the business that sells him wreaths in Franklin had to cut back his order.
When southern New Hampshire was still getting rain, those northern areas were getting snow, which has made it difficult to get trees trimmings out of the woods.
“It is what it is and you gotta deal,” Forster said. “It’s hard. It’s hardwork.”
Forster advises those coming to cut their own tree to dress warmly with boots and gloves.
Forster’s Tree Farm technically opens Friday, but Forster said visitors have already started to come. It will be open weekdays, 10 a.m. until dark, and weekends, 9 a.m. until dark.
U.S. consumers are expected to buy about 27 million trees, roughly the same as the last two years, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.