We sell about 15,000 Christmas trees a year, but we have somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 trees on the farm in total.
We normally sell our last tree at about 6pm on Christmas Eve. I don't know why people leave it that late, but they do. For our own house, we quite often just have whatever is left in the yard.
We work on the trees, in one form or another, for 11 months of the year. There is a perception among the public that you stick a little Christmas tree in the ground and you come back five years later and you've got this perfect tree.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. The quality of the trees is absolutely proportional to the amount of time you put into them. Work starts in the spring, with different jobs throughout the year. Eventually we come around to September when we start marking them up, and then wholesaling them.
I'm 65 now, and I don't spend as much time actually out in the trees as I used to. I spend more time in the office doing all the bureaucracy that goes on in farming nowadays.
The weather can cause trouble and make life difficult. It's very hard to harvest Christmas trees in winter when there can be six inches of snow on them. Equally, if it's very wet it's an extremely unpleasant job and it's difficult to keep the trees from getting muddy. But generally, apart from the unpleasantness, the weather doesn't influence things that much.
On average, Christmas trees grow a foot a year. So to get a six- or seven-foot tree, takes that many years. You spend a lot of time and money investing in a product which you're not quite sure whether you're going to sell at the end of the day.
You get very tired, physically and emotionally, because you're working to a date. If you grow cereals, for example, you're absolutely dependent on the weather and you don't know whether you'll be finishing the harvest early or late. But with Christmas trees, you know that come hell or high water, the job is over on 24 December. Once we get to Christmas, we all have a fortnight off. Nobody does any work until January.
It's a fine balancing act because the fresher the tree, the better the tree. Christmas tree growing would be very easy if you could do it all in the summer when the days are long and the weather is pleasant. But you can't. We leave it as late as possible to cut the trees – we start on about 10 November. So there's quite a lot of pressure. We could make life a lot easier for ourselves by cutting them earlier, but the quality of the trees would be far worse.
I made the decision to go into trees big time about 30 years ago. I started farming here in Oxfordshire 1970 when it was a dairy and arable farm. I sold the cows in 1980 and was looking for something else to do. I had grown a few trees on the farm before and after some research I realised it was an ideal site; this was how The Tree Barn began. Another very fortunate aspect of it is that I happen to live in a place called Christmas Common, so the marketing is very easy.
Now, we do a lot of big trees – for hotels in London, Oxford colleges and towns. This year, we even did the tree for Downing Street.
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