I recently spent an afternoon brush hogging and grass cutting what we call our “new field” where we are growing Christmas trees that are out of sight of our choose and cut customers. That work was done with our 1984 Kubota which just keeps on humming along.
Our trusty 1984 Kubota
The original plan was to make this our wholesale tree field, where we would harvest trees for our wholesale customers, Dandelion Acres in Bethel, VT, Rich Wright’s tree sales on Route 5 south between White River Junction and North Hartland, Vermont, and Mill Gardens in Orford, New Hampshire.
The problem has become that since this field is out of sight, it has become a winter feeding ground for our over sized deer population and many of the trees have been severely “eaten” in the last couple of harsh winters. So what do we do? Harvest the trees in the middle of the field because the deer don’t get to those quite as bad as those on the edges. And eventually the rest of the Christmas trees will get big enough so that they will have six or seven feet above the deer eating line. The whole tree will be 12 feet tall with the top 7 feet being in good shape…just takes longer! We’ve had to do the same thing with many Fraser firs in the other fields over the years.
More about Kubota. That’s a John Deer seat because I couldn’t find a Kubota replacement when the original wore out. Kubota is also used for bucketing snow around in winter, pulling Christmas trees that get stuck in our netters (once in a while a large Christmas tree gets stuck in one of the tree netters and Kubota pulls it through with chains!) roto-tilling and driveway scraping. Kubota is a great old tractor and a necessity on our Christmas tree farm! (We also have a newer new Holland Polar Express tractor but that story is for another time)
