For Wynn Goering, UNM vice provost for academic affairs, and his wife, Ardie, the familiar song works better in the plural: “Oh, Christmas Trees!” They think Tannenbaum all the time. Owners of Pine Creek Farm, a 15 acre Christmas tree farm nestled near Goessel Kan., the Goerings can be found this time of year selling Scotch and Austrian pine trees, Fraser firs, fresh wreaths, tree stands and all tree supplies.
Photo: Wynn Goering at his Pine Creek Farm in Kansas.
“People come in, select a tree and cut it down themselves,” Goering said, adding that he and Ardie also bring in cut Fraser firs from Michigan. They also sell lotions and soaps made by a local woman, log cabin cans of maple syrup supplied by New York retirees they know, and pistachios from Cloudcroft, N.M. “A little piece of New Mexico in Kansas,” he remarked, adding, “We tried selling chile ristras, but people in Kansas didn’t get it.”
While Wynn works on his inbox at UNM, Ardie’s at work on the farm. “Seventy-five percent of our business is the weekend after Thanksgiving and the following two weekends,” Goering said.
But they can’t just show up to sell the trees. The process starts each year in the spring when they arrive for a week to hand plant some 2,000 seedlings; hand planting because the clay soil can create conditions that bog down machinery designed to plant the 8” to 18” seedlings.
“That work makes me appreciate my day job,” Goering said. About 65 percent of the seedlings survive the first year; about 50 percent survive to adulthood. “But some of those don’t become nice trees,” he explained.
The Goerings rely on rain to quench the trees’ thirst. They return for a week in the summer to trim the trees. In fall they tag them to prepare them for sale. “It takes seven years to grow a 5’-6’ tree,” he said.
Is the farm lucrative? “There’s an economic theory among farmers that they make a little money, but they don’t put a price on their labor. I use my annual leave to tend the trees. Does it pay? No, but it pays in other ways than dollars and cents,” he said.
Goering said that the workload in his Scholes Hall office looks the same day to day. “But on the farm you can see what you’ve done at the end of the day or the year. Where once stood an empty field, you now see trees growing,” he said.
Both Wynn and Ardie grew up in Kansas farm country. Wynn’s roots are in Moundridge, Kan., about 10 miles from Goessel, in central Kansas. His family raised wheat. Pine Creek Farm belonged to Ardie’s parents’, but three years ago, the Goerings bought it from them, “With the 8,000 trees that came with it,” he said.
Vacationing in New Mexico brought the Goerings to Albuquerque and Wynn to UNM.
“We feel at home here, regardless of the differences from rural Kansas. There is an attachment to land and a sense of place that comes from many generations residing on the same land. And, there’s a shared sense of the importance of how land is used,” he said.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu