Live Christmas tree sales up this year, local farm sees big increase

MADISON COUNTY, Tenn. — Across the country, real Christmas tree sales are soaring, and at home, that’s no different.

The Ward Family in Beech Bluff has owned their Christmas tree farm since the 1980s. It’s 20,000 acres, and they plant about 5,000 trees a year.

“We basically, ever since we’ve opened, have increased our sales a little bit every year, but nothing on the order of what we’ve done this year,” said Sue Ward, owner emeritus of the Ward Grove Christmas Tree Farm. “We are on track to increase our sales by 25-30%.”

The reason the family is selling so many trees may not have anything to do with the trees themselves — it has everything to do with you. They say that buying habits are changing.

“People are looking for more experience-oriented activities these days,” Ward said. “A large number of those customers are either first time customers or customers who are returning to a real tree.”

After this year’s boom in sales, it will be a game of keeping up.

“We’re hoping we were on the front-end curve of that,” Ward said. “A 30% increase in sales without a corresponding increase in planting would mean we’d be out of trees in a couple of years. So hopefully we’ve responded correctly.”

We also spoke with a local nursery who said sales have been good this year, and they only had five trees left.