Sweet all year round: Greenwood Tree Farm

Location is everything. Greenwood Tree Farm is just 25 miles from Boston. Families return every year as a Christmas tradition to choose and cut their Christmas tree or choose a pre-cut tree.

Glenn Card of Greenwood Tree Farm in Billerica, MA, is a second-generation Christmas tree farmer. His parents, Andy and Crystal Card, started the tree farm in 1984 because they wanted a supplemental income for their retirement years. Andy and Crystal now live in Louisiana, and the Christmas tree operation is managed by Glenn and his wife Adrienne. Their children, Bristol, Remington and Colt, are third-generation Christmas tree farmers.

They are assisted during the holiday season with a local seasonal crew to help sell more than 1,500 trees annually, offering Fraser, Canaan, Concolor, Balsam and Korean fir. To keep up with supply and demand, they also sell pre-cut Balsam trees brought down from d’Anjou Christmas Trees in Canaan, VT.

Greenwood Tree Farm comprises two farm sites: a 57-acre farm in Billerica and a 75-acre site in Canaan, NY. They grow 11 acres of Christmas trees in Billerica.

The second site is also home to the thriving honeybee operation Crystal’s Raw Honey, with 35,000 hives that are brought around the country to assist in pollinating crops. The operation sells honey online year-round.

Glenn is the third generation to work with the honeybees. Like other apiarists, they have encountered Varroa mites but counter them with insecticide and are working toward better genetics with a USDA breeding program in Baton Rouge, LA. To this end, Crystal’s Raw Honey supplies beekeepers with queens carrying the Varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) trait in honeybees that allows them to behave in such a way that naturally checks the Varroa mites’ ability to reproduce and expand within a hive.

According to crystalsrawhoney.com, while at first the trait might not be passed on, over time, future generations of bees with VSH queens will have the VSH alleles passed on, increasing a hive’s mite resistance.

Crystal’s honey and beeswax candles are also on sale in the Greenwood Tree Farm shop, which is open during the holiday season, selling wreaths, kissing balls, Santa Claus ornaments, Amish baskets and cider. Always customer-friendly, they offer tree drilling to set holes in the trunks to help people fit the tree into their tree stands, as well as a large decoration station.

Glenn grew up at Greenwood Tree Farm and started helping with the operation when he was 12 or 13. For decades, he has seen generations come by the farm to form their own Christmas tradition of selecting and cutting down their own trees.

“I like working with the people around us, working as a family,” said Glenn.

When he was younger, his parents grew blue spruce, but they don’t anymore because they are so difficult to work with, stabbing people with their sharp needles. The firs are kinder to the workers that trim them.

The recent droughts have been hard on the Christmas trees. “Last year we lost 500 trees in New York and 100 trees in Massachusetts,” said Glenn. “Five years ago, we lost 1,000 in Massachusetts.” They are making plans for a drip irrigation system, but it is very expensive.

On the other hand, the bees have no trouble with the heat. “Bees love the heat,” said Glenn.

Not only is the air at both farm sites redolent with the smell of growing Christmas trees, there’s also hives sweetening the air with their honey-making.

Thinking ahead, when Andy and Crystal started their Christmas tree business, they consciously avoided having a “cut-down” situation, where a tree farmer grows Christmas trees six to eight years, then harvests them all and has to wait another eight years for the next crop. They planted at their second farm site in New York, staggering the harvest years.

Following in his parents’ footsteps and ever diversifying, for 15 years, Glenn has raised American Aberdeen cattle for his company New England Beef. They have a herd of 60 cattle. With his champion bull Mayhem, he has raised his cattle for superior genetics and is well-known in the show circuit. People come to buy Mayhem’s offspring as starter calves.

For more information, access greenwoodtreefarm.com.

by Laura Rodley