It’s only five months ‘til Christmas. Yes, we are already beginning to focus on that busy season. Our on line store is now populated with trees, wreaths, stands, garland, kissing balls and so on for the upcoming season. To get a 5% early order discount on any Christmas item ordered before November 1st, use the coupon code REDROCK.
As in most years weather has been our number one issue. In this era of climate change, weather patterns appear and stay around for extended periods of time. This year, so far, we’d like a few more sunny days. After a vacation in early March, we returned to almost bare ground and then were delivered four feet of snow before April. One of the results of that was that the deer ate a lot more of our Christmas trees in late winter than normal because that’s all they could get at! In June we had almost 10 inches of rain, much of it coming down in buckets. Wet ground everywhere, tall weeds, insects and lots of possible fungus problems. Since we don’t use any insecticides or fungicides we keep our fingers crossed. We have become more and more organic over the years and are nearly 100% that way, but we have never used any insecticides or fungicides…something we are very proud of.
Of course the weather does not really affect our evergreen seedlings since they spend their first year in our greenhouses and we can control the weather in the most part…sometimes that is difficult on really hot days, but misting keeps things alive when it’s 120 degrees! We have now operated our evergreen seedling nursery for 10 years and have almost got it figured out. Every year our stock improves and we are better able to grow what our market demands. We think that our seedling business has been highly successful. Since we are both reaching retirement age this year, growing seedlings will be more of our future than Christmas trees…less work for “getting old” folks!
That said, we are going to wind down our Christmas tree and wreath operation over the next few years. We know that some of you have been customers for our Christmas goods for more than 25 years. Hopefully we will find some younger folks who want to take over so those traditions can continue. In the meantime, please order early because what we will have less available for sale each year.
The most satisfying thing about our farm business is the personal touch we are able to give to the orders we send out. Please consider our environmentally friendly evergreen seedlings for an event, whether it be a wedding, memorial, reunion, shower, fundraiser or something else. Every tree takes a little CO2 out of the atmosphere, so we need a lot more trees! For any seedling order over $100, please use the coupon code THANKYOU for a 10% discount.
As always, FedEx (and of course UPS) have raised their rates 5% this year, just like every year, so you will probably pay more for shipping…there is little we can do about that! We try to combine the goods and shipping into one package where we can do it fairly for customers on both coasts. We don’t know yet if FedEx is going to add a “holiday surcharge” like UPS already has.
One of the most important items to be aware of when you order nearing Christmas and choose a delivery day is that guarantees for delivery days stop around the 11th of December.
As always, thank you for being supporters of Redrock Farm. To get to our on line shopping cart use: http://www.christmastrees.net/shop/
