No home feels ready for the holidays without a Christmas tree standing tall, front and center. Fortunately, there’s a variety of places in the Greater Peoria area to pick out the perfect pine.
On a rural property outside of Morton, Pierce Vanne keeps a firm grip on the top of a Frasier Fir. The tree rattles around in a shaker. Vanne says, sometimes, the force of the shaker breaks off the top part of the tree, leaving it without a spot for a star.
The machines can be expensive. Vanne says his small shaker runs about $900. But it’s an important part of the process.
“It obviously gets debris. It gets loose dead needles,” he said. “It can be small bugs.”
Vanne learned all of this recently from Christmas Tree Farmer Facebook groups, associations and Youtube. Vanne, his wife and his three sons all joined the profession when they moved onto a property outside of Morton and renamed the farm to Vanne Farms Christmas Trees.
“This farm has been in operation since the '80s, 1980’s,” he said. “We took over when we moved into the place and made a decision to say ‘yeah, we’ll keep this farm running.’ So, yeah, this is our second year selling Christmas trees.”
Vanne and his wife still juggle full-time jobs, but they're open for a few weekends a season. This year they wrapped up last Saturday after selling nearly 150 trees.
Vanne is preparing for the long term. He says the farm is planting extensively, somewhere between 800 and 900 trees this spring. It's important to get started early because it takes a while for a Christmas tree to be ready to sell.
Usually, it takes anywhere between seven and 10 years.
“The turnaround on a Christmas tree farm, it’s not, I would compare it to driving a container ship,” Vanne said. “You have to start turning really early to get the ship headed in the right direction. You can’t just suddenly change. So part of the reason Christmas tree farms shut down their u-cut operations soon is to have Christmas trees for the next year and the next year and the next year.”
The turnaround process is a bit different for retailers like Hoerr Nursery. A sign just a little ways down the road from the garden center advertises "Peoria's largest indoor Christmas tree lot."
Marketing director Renee O'Brien says the lot starts each season with around 140 trees. They come from a variety of sources.
“So, if you’re a supplier our size, you have to get creative because we don’t have the buying power of a larger retailer,” said O’Brien. “So we work both with a tree farm that doubles as a broker in Michigan, and they do send us local trees, as well as trees that they source if they need to.”
Hoerr also sometimes joins in on the orders of other local nurseries and garden centers.
‘We’ll switch contracts,” said O’Brien. “So they’ll get in extra trees for us and we’ll get extra trees for them. That’s how we get the quantity we need on our orders.”
There are a lot of factors that play into the availability of Christmas trees from year to year. Drought conditions in Illinois this summer means some farmers saw significant losses in the plants they were planning to sell years from now.
As O'Brien puts it: "you have to count backwards."
“That [drought] might not affect more established trees that are being cut right now,” she said. “But we might look back in about five to seven years and say ‘oh, that drought that we had in 2023 is really affecting supplies, because that’s when they were trying to start the new trees that would have been sold this year.’”
Vanne says his family's farm weathered the drought conditions pretty successfully, with around an 85% survival rate for the seedlings.
“That was with watering them and we decided to mulch them, doing good weed prevention and going after that,” he said. “I was really, actually, happy and surprised about that. I was worried we were going to lose all the trees.”
According to Vanne, there's also an ongoing discussion about the best species of tree to grow for Midwest holidays. The Frasier Fir is the typical Christmas classic, but another species may be better suited.
“Canaan Firs are, they perform a lot better in Illinois soil,” said Vanne. “A lot of people say ‘why not Frasier Firs.’ Frasier Firs get root rot, that can destroy a whole crop. Our soil and climate isn’t necessarily designed for Frasier Firs.”
Vanne has learned a lot about the agricultural aspects of Christmas Tree farming in just two years. He's also interested in the environmental side of caring for his six acres of trees.
“We’re going to have over a thousand trees out here,” Vanne said. “And about an acre of Christmas trees provides oxygen for about 18 people in a year. It also acts as a carbon sink.”
Additionally, Vanne is proud to be part of the legacy of a farm that started almost 40 years ago.
“We even had a lady come the other day and tell me, as she entered our driveway, said ‘I was brought to tears by the emotions,’” he said. “Of just all the great times she had with her family out here.”
Vanne says he's continuing family traditions decades in the making, while helping to start brand new ones. Vanne Farms Christmas Trees is closed for the season, but will return next year. It's outside Morton on Robison Road.
