Christmas Tree growers across Nova Scotia surprised by tree quality after dry summer

Maritime Christmas tree growers say this year’s crop is looking good.

The Christmas tree growing season in Nova Scotia shaped out to be much better than growers expected.

The drought this summer worries many farmers, and they thought they may be in for a rough harvest. To their surprise that wasn’t the case.

“We’ve really recognized that the bulk of the tree is quite strong. The balsam fir Christmas tree, and remarkably these trees are looking fantastic this year. Despite some of the seedling loss, the tree itself in its market condition is fabulous. Some of the best products we have seen in a lot of years,” says Mike Harlow, Nova Scotia Christmas Tree president.

In New Ross, Colin Hughes runs a Christmas tree farm with around 20 million trees across 2,000 acres.

“We had a terrible dry summer, but our trees grew well which was kind of strange, and the weather man has been great to us during harvest season we have had perfect weather,” says Hughes, G&C Ltd. owner.

The team harvests about ten percent of their trees. Despite dry conditions throughout the summer months, the weather for the harvest came through for Hughes.

“We have had very few shedders this year, the trees are looking great the best they have been in quite some time,” adds Hughes.

The larger more established trees saw limited impact. Hughes says he was impressed by the great colour, size and quality of the trees. The worry was needle retention but that too ended up being fine so far.

“When the trees came in off the lots the moisture percent was under 40 percent, 37, 38 per cent moisture content so we put the water right to those trees and once they were in our yard for a couple of days we got it up to 47-48 per cent, where they need to be,” says Hughes.

“Despite the drought and the losses within the drought, the trees have responded very very well and are looking healthy and moisture and all the indicators that you look for in a Christmas tree,” says Harlow.

But when it comes to seedlings, Hughes explains not many of theirs survived.

“They just didn’t get the water they needed and places on higher rocky land, they didn’t do well at all, so we lost a substantial amount of them,” adds Hughes.

Other growers across Nova Scotia saw this same trend.

Mike Harlow describes the impact on the seedlings as significant.

“The ground and soil were sandy, with less ability to retain any water so those first year seedlings generally would have died,” adds Harlow.

This could impact the supply in future years.

“Those trees we planted four years ago that we lost and three years and so on, that’s inventory that’s now gone and at some point in time that will have an effect on the supply,” adds Hughes.

Although the growing season turned out to be better than they expected, the demand hasn’t necessarily kept up with the supply. They say it’s due to uncertainty with tariffs and international markets.

“We touch a lot of places overseas and then of course all down the eastern seaboard and out west,” says Hughes.

They start their harvest earlier than most, starting at the end of September. Hughes says he’s down in sales though this year and he attributes it to U.S. trade and tariff uncertainty.

“We are down substantially. We have shipped as high as 155 thousand trees last year we were down to 140 thousand, this year we will be lucky if we do 90 thousand,” adds Hughes.

Nova Scotia is a strong market when it comes to international sales for Christmas trees, but this year worry has created a trend, not a positive one and this is something that worries some growers here.

“It seems like people are getting a little more comfortable, and we are getting last minute orders now but at the start of the season people were nervous.”

Most of their sales are international so this worries Hughes. But this year he’s just grateful to have the supply and hopes by Christmas the demand picks up.

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