PLUMCREEK -- It's the perfect time of the year for Christmas tree farmer Brad Fleming.
"It's so hustle-bustle all year long," said Fleming, 35, of Elderton, who owns and operates Fleming's Landscaping Co. with his dad, uncle and brother, a family-run wholesale and retail business with hundreds of thousands of Christmas trees on 330 acres at their main farm in Plumcreek just off Route 210 about a mile south of Elderton. The business was started in the early 1960s by Brad's grandfather Glenn Fleming.
"It's kind of the time to just take a breather, deal with the public and enjoy the season," he said. "All year long we work to get to this point. We plant, mow and dig in the spring, trim in the summer and dig again in the fall. Everything leads up to these 20 days in December before Christmas."
"It comes once a year and you're never going to get it back again. You can't describe it or put it into words. It's a good feeling."
Fleming greeted a 2-year-old customer. "Do you remember this place?" he asked. "You came here to pick out a tree last year."
"He can walk around this time," said Leon Young, a regular customer from Pittsburgh who came along with his wife, Jennifer, and son David in their pickup truck on a hunt for the right tree to hang their trimmings. They drove the 2 1/2-mile loop and side roads around the farm looking for it.
"The biggest one they have," Young added. "We always find the one we're looking for."
The business is mostly wholesale to customers as far east as Rehoboth Beach, Del., north to New York's Hudson River and west to the middle of Ohio.
Fleming's has plenty of Fraser firs, Douglas firs, concolor firs, blue spruce, Scotch pine, white pine, Austrian pine, Norway spruce and Serbian spruce trees to go around.
"We try to cycle our years," Fleming said. "You can't have everything coming on at once because you'd have a glut of trees."
Soil type and elevation are factors in growing the best trees.
"You have to know what trees will grow where," Fleming said. "Some grow well in clay while others die; some do well in well-drained soil and others won't.
"We think we have that figured out, but we're always learning."
For the wholesale operation, tractor-trailer trucks pull up to a platform to get their load of trees. The wholesale season runs from two weeks before Thanksgiving, when they start cutting the trees, until the first few days of December.
"That's when most retailers want to fill their lots," Fleming said.
With the wholesale season just ending, Fleming's is beginning to sell trees on site to retail customers.
"Our retail business has been growing each year because we've been keeping our prices low," Fleming said.
Douglas and Fraser firs are the most popular trees and 6 to 8 feet is the size preferred by customers.
But yesterday Fleming and an employee, Shane Malloy, 26, of Elderton, were busy loading a 16-foot Frazer fir to personally take to a customer in Fox Chapel.
Fleming said that three years ago, the man and his wife came out in a Lexus SUV with no roof rack and went out into the field to pick out a large Fraser fir.
He wanted a 16-foot Fraser and was going to put it on top of his car.
"It will smash your roof," Fleming said he told him.
His wife talked him into letting Fleming haul it instead, and since then they've been delivering the tree.
Fleming said people will come to get their tree and will gather the whole family around it at the base of the hill and take a picture.
"And that's their Christmas card," he said.
They've had groups of up to 30 people come from Pittsburgh and huddle together with their saws.
"It's a unique experience that we can provide that. A retail tree lot can't," Fleming said.
"You can come out and find that certain tree," he said. "Some people will spend a whole day here looking, but that very first tree that they liked will be the one that they always come back to and get."
