Appomattox County tree farm delivering Christmas trees to troops

This Christmas, military families in Illinois will celebrate with Christmas trees grown in Appomattox County.

Those families will receive their tree through a program called Trees for Troops, which gives donated Christmas trees to military families for free.

Appomattox County Christmas tree growers Wayne and Beverly Bowman donated 50 trees this year to the program.

The decision to participate was easy, the Bowmans said. “We hope it will do some good and make it a little easier at Christmastime,” Wayne Bowman said.

“Money is tight all over. This will be just one less thing they will have to spend money on.”

The program, in its fourth year, collects tree donations from growers and distributes them to military families throughout the country and overseas.

Last year, the program delivered 16,846 trees from more than 750 farmers in 29 states.The Bowmans, who own the Piney Mountain Christmas Tree farm, began growing trees in 1979 as a hobby. Wayne is a state forester at the Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest and figured growing the trees would be “something fairly easy for us to get into,” he said.

Only the long-needled white pine and Scotch pines are grown on their farm because of the local climate, Bowman said. “Here in the Piedmont, it’s so hot and dry that I can’t get (other pines) to live,” he said. “They’re out of their range. They grow naturally in the mountains of Virginia. We’re kind of on the edge of where they’ll grow.”

Other types of trees used for decorating include Fraser firs, blue spruces and other short-needled pine trees that only grow in the mountains or cooler climates, Bowman said. On the flip side, the pines that Bowman grows won’t thrive as close as North Carolina, he said.

His Christmas trees must grow for seven to 10 years before they are ready for harvesting, Bowman said. The trees naturally grow several feet per year, but after the spring growth spurt, Bowman and the local teenagers he hires trim the trees back so they grow only about a foot per year. That’s so the trees will be bushy and not Charlie Brown-esque, he said.

Most of the trees grown on the Bowmans’ farm go to wholesale buyers, but they have a cut-your-own retail business that’s thriving, they said.

They also spend much of the first part of Christmas tree season putting together fresh pine wreaths from short-needled trees they harvest from a Floyd County grower.

The Bowmans plant 1,000 trees per acre, but by harvest time, they average about 600 per acre because some trees die and others don’t meet appearance standards. “Everything doesn’t make a pretty tree,” Bowman said. “Some of them are too thin, some are just not pretty.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.treesfortroops.com
http://www.virginiachristmastrees.org/farms/pineymtn/index.html