[title subtitle=”WORDS and IMAGES Dwain Hebda”][/title]
Finding your way to Pine Grove Christmas Tree Farm isn’t particularly difficult, especially accompanied by the surrounding mountain scenery, beautiful at any time of year. But turning onto Yocum Street off Arkansas Highway 22 right outside of Charleston, the entrance to the place, you suddenly face a steep dilly of a hill, the kind that juts your windshield to the sky and makes you feel like you’re going up and over the lip of the world.
As your vehicle levels, it’s as if a curtain is raised on a spot frozen in time and season. Down a lane and around a bend, you take in the picturesque tree farm, its strident rows of pine and cedar spinach-green against a straw-colored fade of winter grass. Each tree, nurtured and manicured to perfection, seems more radiant than the last.
Santa himself couldn’t have seeded a prettier spot than this patch of Franklin County.
“This is our second Christmas tree farm,” says Greg Eckert who founded the business with his wife Betty in 1978. “The first one was where we had some land in Paris. When we got interested in Christmas trees, we planted trees there.
“We found some land in Charleston in about ‘86, ‘87 so we started planting here also. Over the years, we phased out the Paris farm, but we had both of them for ten or fifteen years. We got to where at Christmas we had two Christmas tree lots in Fort Smith and we had the tree farm here in Charleston and the tree farm in Paris. That spread us pretty thin.”
Actually, Greg tells you on second thought, the operations ran three farms for a spell, the third being in Oklahoma. But as the former pharmacist and his schoolteacher bride tell you, that workload took a lot of the merry out of Christmas. These days, the retired couple has all they want working their twenty-acre Charleston ground, twelve of which are planted to their holiday-season cash crop.
“Someone told me one time, I guess it was a farmer, he said, ‘You’ve got to have a pretty good job to afford to farm,’ I think that’s the case,” Greg says. “It’s hard to make a living farming, especially something as seasonal as Christmas trees. I worked in the pharmacy at Sparks Regional Medical Center for forty-two years and I worked a schedule where I worked twelve-hour days seven days in a row and then I was off for seven days. That’s how I had time to do the Christmas trees, on my weeks off. And, of course, Betty worked pretty much all the time she was teaching.”
“I was always on board with the idea,” Betty interjects. “I can’t remember when we first started talking about it, but I always trusted Greg to make good decisions. He was a hard worker, kind of a workaholic. It’s been a good thing for us.
“We try to provide a family with a fun, memorable Christmas experience. Nobody is ever in a bad mood out here. They’re all having fun, laughing, chasing one another, finding people they may know. They can’t believe it when they run into somebody they know out here.”
Long before planting their own forest, Greg and Betty grew up in the same general neck of the woods, Greg in Subiaco and Betty in Scranton. Both shared a Catholic heritage with an education to match, she for two years at St. Scholastica Academy then on to Scranton High School; he at St. Benedict grade school and Subiaco Academy.
“We kind of always knew each other when we were in high school, but we didn’t really talk until we got together in college (at Arkansas Tech in Russellville),” Betty says. “We met outside of the library; there was a hurt puppy there, so we stopped to help the puppy and that’s how we started talking and it progressed. It’s now forty-six years of marriage.”
The marriage also produced four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom came along for the ride when Greg started toying with the idea of a Christmas tree farm.
“A co-worker friend of mine showed me a copy of an article on people doing research out in South Carolina about growing Virginia pine for Christmas trees,” he says. “Up until that time most all the Christmas trees came from up north where they could grow the fir trees and the Scotch pines. But these guys were experimenting with Virginia pine to see if they could be raised in the South for Christmas trees.
“I thought that was rather interesting, so I called one of the researchers on the phone and asked him where he got his seedlings. He told me and I went ahead and ordered seedlings. Got them and started planting.”
The researchers were on to something and Virginia pine has been a best seller for the Pine Grove operation ever since. Fifteen years ago, the couple added Leyland cypress. Tucked in between these emerald beauties are a smattering of other varieties: Murray cypress and the frosty Carolina Sapphire and Blue Ice pines.
“Last year, we had just for fun about three or four pink trees,” Betty says. “You can’t resist it when your little girl wants that pink tree, you know? So, they went fast. This year I think we’re going to have a few white trees for fun.”
Trees take five years to mature to sellable dimensions, so species selection and rotation of planting plats is of utmost importance in the Eckerts’ business.
“We tried Scotch pine and we tried white pine and a couple different kinds of firs, but nothing really grew very good for us here,” Greg says. “Now, the white pine makes a beautiful tree, but they just grew so, so slowly. It would take ten years to get a tree big enough to sell and they would do weird things. They’d do fine one day and the next day they were dead.”
“They’re sensitive to the heat,” Betty adds.
As it happens, so are customers. Warm weather is a mood-killer for tree shoppers, Greg says, while also noting too much Christmas atmospheric conditions is bad as well. That’s why over the five weeks in November and December that they’ve worked all year for, the family isn’t above taking out their rosaries and asking for a little light seasonal weather.
“A hot sunny day, we don’t really like those when we’re selling trees,” Greg says. “If there’s a little chill in the air, if it’s a little cloudy or looks like it might snow, that gets people in the mood and they come out.
“We average about four hundred trees. We sell ninety percent of our trees probably on three weekends. If the weather happens to be bad those weekends it can really, really hurt you.”
Between the uncertainty of the weather and the ready availability of pre-cut trees available seemingly everywhere, the Eckerts lean on creating an experience that goes beyond the trees themselves. The farm offers a variety of barnyard animals including pygmy goats, sheep and baby pig races featuring Porky, Petunia and Wilbur. That, plus hayrides through the sparklingly decorated tree farm lends an ambiance that can’t be replicated on a parking lot. It brings people out by the generation-load.
“That’s fun,” Betty says. “We get to visit with people every year and see how their families are doing and meet their grandchildren and see their grandchildren grow up.”
“Most people who come out to get a tree, it’s not usually just one person. It’s usually the whole family,” Greg says. “They’ll come back year after year. They’re making memories, making family traditions.”
Pine Grove Christmas Tree Farm
2919 Yocum Street, Charleston, Arkansas
479.965.4428
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