Pining for Christmas: Tree farm a year-round job
Staff writer
The county’s two Christmas tree farms, Peaceful Pines and Pine Creek, each finished up sales last weekend and will close until Thanksgiving 2025. But that doesn’t mean the farms will hibernate during all that time.
“It starts in March,” said Kenton Nickel, who runs Peaceful Pines with his wife, Eunice. “We’ll get a shipment of seedlings and we stick them in the ground, get them watered, tie them to a stake, so they’re not blowing over.”
After planting comes months of mowing and weeding.
“We’ve got about 11 acres worth of trees,” said Wynn Goering, who runs Pine Creek with his wife, Ardie. “Every time it rains, the grass grows, and you have to go over it again.”
In June, work ramps up. Six months from Christmas, Nickel says, is generally his busiest time of year.
“That’s when the shearing or shaping of the tree starts,” he said. “We’ll come out and pretty much hit every tree with either a shearing knife or a hand pruner, depending on the size.”
Without pruning, the branches can explode outward, turning the tree’s classic conical shape into a spiky round mess.
Sometimes it happens despite the farm’s best efforts.
“We typically, after a point, give up and let them go,” Goering said. “I use them to make wreaths.”
After a few more months, the farms mark off sellable trees and recruit others to help as seasonal attendants.
“It’s mostly my wife and I, but then we have family that come and help us in the gift shop and help shake trees,” Nickel said.
Peaceful Pines, at 762 80th Rd., and Pine Creek, at 994 Meridian Rd., share quite a few similarities.
Both lie in the southwestern part of the county. Peaceful Pines is near Goessel, while Pine Creek so far west it lists both Marion and McPherson County addresses on its website.
Both couples live on their farms, have quaint gift shops, and shell out free peppernuts and cider to customers.
Differences between operations essentially boil down to the age and size of the farms.
Peaceful Pines opened in 2018, while Pine Creek was opened by Ardie’s parents 40 years earlier.
Kenton Nickel even worked at Pine Creek before starting Peaceful Pines.
“We have people who tell us they’ve been here 30 years. We know most of those customers, and now we know their kids and their grandkids,” Goering said.
Pine Creek’s age adds a storybook feel to the place. Plywood displays of dancing bears and bonnet-wearing girls add to the effect.
So, too, do beavers that scurry around the eponymous creek. (Goering recently installed a fence around the water to stop them nibbling at tree trunks.)
Pine Creek is a vast farm. The Goerings plant between 1,200 and 1,500 trees a year; firs and pines stretch far into the distance.
“My own figuring is that if half of them eventually end up to be nice Christmas trees, you’re doing good,” Goering said.
The property is so large that the couple rents out 28 acres to a local farmer. Most customers drive rather than walk around the complex.
“The wide-open nature of the place, I think, is distinctive,” Goering said.
Peaceful Pines is an easier farm to comprehend. Trees fill a large square field in neat rows, like an infantry line.
The newer farm also has made a point to highlight kids’ activities. Red laminated clues are affixed to some of their trees as part of a scavenger hunt.
“They get out here and can just run wild,” Nickel said.
A large barn — bigger even than the Nickel home — is under construction near the farm entrance. This, too, will house kids’ crafts and games during the season.
Both farms import fir trees, which grow in cold weather and cannot deal with Kansas heat.
These fill out their homegrown inventories of scotch, Virginia, white, and Austrian pines, all of which possess slightly different shapes and aromas.
Some pines are sprayed to retain a bluish color in the winter.
“They’re normally a little bluer of a tree throughout the year, and then they turn yellow,” Nickel said.
On the last weekend of the selling season, most of the trees are five feet or shorter.
They are the remnants of a picked-over farm, as well as those which the farm would not yet sell.
Tree farmers have to have patience to succeed. Fully grown Christmas trees are about 7 years old, but it can take longer with dry summers that Kansas is seeing more and more frequently.
As most of the work on a tree is done in the early stages of its life, selling one when it is 5 rather than 7 years old only decreases profit margins.
“We’ve cut back how many we sell from three or four years ago, just to try and let the little ones grow a little more,” Nickel said.
Peaceful Pines had sold 150 trees by Friday. Nickel expected they would sell 20 more over the weekend before closing.
He cited Marion, Goessel, and Peabody as hotspots for customers, although he’s had some from as far as Wichita and Emporia.
“People are willing to travel,” he said.
Pine Creek draws mostly from Newton and McPherson, but Goering said a decline in nearby tree farms had led to a wide variety of customers.
“Every year we get people from a little farther out,” he said. “There’s a guy from way up, close to Belleville, and somehow we get trees that he likes. He’s been down here three years in a row.”
Customers appreciate the DIY nature of both farms, where families cut down their own trees using manual saws.
“Our system of giving people a saw and telling them they can drive around the whole place, that’s kind of uncommon,” Goering said.
He said customers appreciated the down-home aspects of Pine Creek. Customers can even bring their own equipment.
“In Marion County, there’s a lot of people who know how to use a chainsaw,” Goering said. “I think they’d be slightly offended if you told them they couldn’t use it.”
Despite the year-round nature of the work, both Nickel and Goering consider themselves part-time tree farmers.
Kenton Nickel works in construction most of the year; Eunice is a math teacher.
Wynn Goering was an administrator at the University of New Mexico for 20 years and now works for a firm in Kansas City finding provosts for universities.
Ardie tends to the family homes (they have one in New Mexico) and does administrative work at Pine Creek.
Running a tree farm seems a tall task to be seen as “a weekend and evening hobby,” as Nickel puts it, but both farms seem to take pleasure in the work.
“We enjoy it, so it’s more of a hobby than work a lot of times the way we see it,” he said.
Ardie and Wynn Goering are older and treat the work as a long-lasting project that brings them fresh joy each year.
Wynn spoke about listening to audio books while mowing and pruning— old American novels, like “Moby-Dick,” are his favorite.
“The good thing about farming is look back at the end of the day, and you can see what you’ve done,” Goering said. “I like working with my hands, the tangible accomplishments.”