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Christmas trees are common as grass; growers aren’t
as visible
By Lon Leatherland; ran in Alleghany News
Christmas trees are almost as common as grass in
Alleghany County, but those who made it that way
aren’t nearly so visible.
Knowing nothing about the tree-growing process, a
visit to Homer and Bonnie Sides’ operation seemed a
good place to begin. Their corporate office is a
single-wide trailer, which is quite different than
what I’d imagined. But, then, so is Bonnie.
Dressed to the nines, she could have stepped out of
a Cosmopolitan magazine. This picture of elegance
leaned back in the sofa’s corner, talking with a
young lady.
Shirley Cornett pointed me down the hill to where “a
tall man wearing a cap” would be. He wasn’t there,
but an employee radioed that I wanted to talk to
him. Lewis Farmer appeared several minutes later,
listened to my intentions and suggested that I
follow him across the street. He climbed onto a
tractor seat and drove to the road, making three
cell phone calls between the shop and Grandview
Drive, forty yards away. In less than five minutes
he’d assigned tasks to several employees and we were
talking.
An Alleghany native, Lewis worked with Sparta
Industries for thirty years, joining the Sides’
organization in 1994 as Supervisor. He’s a very
busy, but remarkably calm, gentleman.
Homer and Bonnie didn’t walk down the wedding aisle
and step into overnight success. Theirs was a humble
start together. He drove a cement truck at the time,
and dreamed of starting a ready-mix concrete company
of his own. To make ends meet, they grew
watermelons. Bonnie drove a car loaded down with
watermelons and sold them while Homer sold melons
out of the back of his pickup truck. Little by
little, the family’s future turned toward Christmas
trees.
Among the county’s first tree-growers, Homer and his
brother, Bruner, started planting in the 50s. They
grew white pines at first, “shearing” them for
fullness, then changed to Fraser firs when that
species captured the market.
Homer ran the tractor and Bonnie planted seedlings
from the “setter,” a towed, trailer-like planter.
Their daughters carefully toe-tamped the dirt around
every tree. Lewis explained Homer’s logical approach
to mountainside planting.
“Have you ever watched a cow walk around these
hills? She always takes the easiest way along the
hillside, not up and down the mountain. That’s the
way Homer taught me to plant trees, along the hill.”
Lewis told of the ribbing Homer took from his fellow
cement truck drivers, who spent their spare time
fishing, hunting or playing golf. But the determined
tree-grower got the last laugh. “Them ol’ boys are
probably still driving cement trucks,” he said,
perhaps hiding a satisfied grin.
Homer’s dad needled him, too, about the way he
reinvested his earnings into more land and
seedlings, but his success soon outlasted the
taunts. Now he grows 1,500 to 1,800 trees to the
acre, and has 2,000 acres of tree farms scattered in
Alleghany and Ashe, as well as in two nearby
Virginia counties.
Lewis described the work in detail, tossing out some
unfamiliar terms. “First come the seedbeds. It takes
about three years to reach the seedling stage. Those
go into ‘lineout” beds, where they grow for another
two years or so. By then they’re about a foot tall.
Most trees are cut at about six or eight feet, seven
years later, but we’ve sold some twenty-footers,
too. Shearing all our trees into the proper shape
takes two or three months.”
Several years ago an unexpectedly late freeze
clobbered Alleghany’s Christmas trees, killing new
growth. The Sides’ operation suffered a little
damage, but none to the ‘big stuff,’ which grew well
with the early spring rains.
From what I saw and Lewis’ comments, it’s obvious
that the mountains’ tree-growing efforts would never
have come this far without the labors of a large
Hispanic workforce.
“We’ve got really hard workers,” Lewis said
matter-of-factly. “I just tell ‘em what needs to be
done, then get out of the way so they can do it. By
the time I come back, they’re through and looking
for something else to do.”
But I’ll always carry an image of the Bonnie Sides I
met briefly, spending endlessly hot and dusty days
on the hard steel seat of a “tree setter,” poking
little green trees into the ground as her girls
tap-danced around each one. |
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