Reggie Pulliam has seen many families choose and cut their own Christmas tree at his Kringlewood Christmas Tree Farm outside Zachary over the past 35 years.
But this holiday season, only a half dozen select customers came to choose between the dozen or so trees still standing since Pulliam began ramping down tree planting about five years ago. He had planned for 2011 to be Kringlewood’s last year of business for a long time, but some trees remained after last holiday season.
“We just quit planting in time to where we would run out of trees,” Pulliam says of the Kringlewood farm. “My son and son-in-law just decided they didn’t want to take it over.”
At 79, Pulliam is now converting his farm into a hay growing operation.
“If you didn’t just love to do it, you wouldn’t do it for a living down here,” Pulliam says of running a Christmas tree farm in south Louisiana. “We had a lot of competition with trees coming down from the north.”
Because those northern trees—mostly Douglas fir and spruce species—could retain moisture for two to three months after harvest, they could go up for sale in parking lots around the Capital Region, while Pulliam’s trees couldn’t. His hybrids—Virginia pine, Leyland cypress and Carolina sapphire—had to stay in the ground, or else they’d dry up and lose all their needles.
When business was good in the 1980s, Pulliam says he would plant 15 acres of trees a year at Kringlewood. But over the past 10 years he planted only one acre of trees to keep a five-acre crop in rotation. He points to the rise in popularity and durability of the artificial tree since he got into planting and harvesting trees in 1977.
Pulliam says he’s not the only grower to get out of the business. He notes Christmas Forest, located about five miles north of Zachary, also closed in 2011. Christmas Forest no longer has a valid working phone number and could not be reached for comment.
However, the Windy Hills Farm in Ethel still grows choose-and-cut Christmas trees. But the farm runs out of inventory quick. A note on the Windy Hills Farm website says the business had sold out its Christmas tree stock this season on Dec. 3.
Though he’s down to just a handful of trees, Pulliam says he may open Kringlewood for a few hours in 2013.
“I probably have half a dozen trees left,” he says.
