When Don Ferrey started selling Christmas trees he grew on a 22-acre parcel of land a few kilometres northeast of the Prince George Airport, he knew he wasn’t going to get rich doing it.
Nineteen years later, the owner/operator of Happy Pappy’s Christmas Tree Farm figures he’s makes “about 17 cents an hour” for all the work he puts into producing his Norway spruce, blue Spruce and sub-alpine fir trees, but it’s well worth it to him.
He does it because he likes people and seeing their reactions when they turn their annual Christmas tree hunt into a what will become a lifetime memory. Tree hunters come to his farm to choose the tree they want and cut it down themselves, then get to sit around a raging campfire to sip coffee or hot chocolate and shoot the breeze.
He produces only enough to sell about 75 trees annually, most of them seven- or eight-footers, at $65 each. If you do the math that adds less than $5,000 a year to add to Ferrie’s pension income. For a few bucks more, he sells the odd 20-footer, like the one on display this year at Northern Lights Estate Winery, but most of his trees will fit in the average home.
“It’s a labour of love, it’s not a money-maker, for sure,” said the72-year-old Rossland native, who retired from his BC Hydro job when he was 55. “I’m lucky to pay the taxes on the land with what we get here.
“I don’t have many more trees than that. Last year I shut down early because I sold those in a relatively short time and I wanted some for this year. I want to make sure people keep coming back and they see a nice tree.”
Fewer people put up real trees at Christmas, choosing instead for the safety and predictability of an artificial tree. But there’s no substitute for that Christmas tree smell and Ferrie says as long as people keep what is still a live tree well-watered, they won’t dry out and become a fire hazard.
“You’d be surprised by how much water they drink in the first three days,” he said. “They come out of the bush and they just suck up that water and after the first three days they stop drinking so much.”
Ferrey bought the property in 1994, a year after part of the land was burned the previous year in a fire started by a kid at the adjacent manufactured home park. A friend cleared the burnt forest and he got rid of the slash and planted clover to put hydrogen into the soil. That’s when he hit upon the idea to plant trees and make it a Christmas tree farm.
The daughter of one of his neighbours, Bobbi Cole, suggested the name. The first few years, before social media, Ferrey put up signs to direct people to the farm, but the word is out about Happy Pappy’s and his Facebook page now has 200 followers.
Ferrey says it takes about 12 years to grow a spruce tree big enough to become a Christmas showpiece, while a balsam fir needs about 17 years to get up to ceiling height. He and his wife Janet live several kilometres away on a different property and he spends a lot of time on the farm fertilizing and watering the trees and physically removing weeds.
He uses no herbicides or pesticides and sometimes his trees get attacked by bugs that cause significant damage like the leader weevil. It kills the crown of some of his Norway spruce and he has to cut off the top and then train another leading branch to replace what was lost and prune it for years until it looks like the perfect tree again. He only prunes his trees in the months that have the letter ‘r.’ In the hotter months they drip sap that attracts aphids.
It's a family event for many of Happy Pappy’s customers and he remembers one boy about six or seven who came out with his dad and took advantage of the snowy slope that leads to the trees from the parking area to do some sliding.
“He was just having a ball, up and down the toboggan hill and his dad was in here having coffee with me and he came in to get his hot chocolate and said, ‘Dad, this is the best day of my life.’ That just stays with you.”
Ferrey snaps a photo of everyone who comes to buy a tree and posts them on his Facebook site and people reciprocate, sending him photos of the trees they’ve decorated in their houses.
“It’s just so satisfying,” he said. “It gives us a real good feeling. It’s creating memories for the families and they don’t have to go way out into the bush to get their tree.”
Happy Pappy’s is at 5072 Shelburn Rd., about a 10-minute drive from downtown Prince George. The farm is open Thursday-Sunday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m., right up until Christmas Eve.
