SIX NATIONS – Located at the far end of Third Line, you can tell you’ve reached J & D Christmas Trees when you see a home surrounded by tall Colorado Blue Spruces, which look like dense pine trees with a hint of blue in the needles.
At the farm, visitors are greeted with a picnic table covered with music speakers, cookies and hot chocolate with the stage set beside a tractor wagon pointing to a field of spruces.
Janis Monture and her sister Arielle Monture, explained that the business has been in the making for a long time.
“This is our first year,” said Monture. “My mom and dad actually started the business about twenty-seven years ago. It was supposed to be my dad’s retirement plan, and then he got busy with his own consulting and so, I actually got inspired by a Christmas movie earlier in the fall. And I thought, well you know we have these trees and they’ve just been sitting back there and we weren’t really doing anything with them, so I told my dad if I can get the word out and just start with local marketing, would we be able to start the farm? And so, my husband and I said we’ll take the lead and my sisters have been helping this first weekend,” she said.
Monture said that one of the goals of the farm is to provide customers with an experience, where they can make a morning or afternoon of it with refreshments, a wagon ride, and a trek through the pines to find that special tree.
“An experience is one of the things we wanted to give people,” she said, mentioning that the wagon ride is about 15 minutes. “So, they can cut their own trees, or take one of the trees that we already precut.” she said.
Blue spruces are a hardy type of tree, which means less clean up and fewer concerns about longevity for customers.
“They last quite a bit longer than some of the balsam firs or the regular Christmas trees, and they don’t lose their needles as much,” she said, noting that when shaken barely any needles fall. “And we precut literally the day of so they’re not sitting around in a lot for weeks on end,” she said, also mentioning that the trees take years to grow. “Typically they’re a slow growing tree, so it takes from fifteen to twenty years.”
Monture mentioned that her father registered the business thinking that he would follow through with it, but the sisters decided to take action this year.
“Me and my other sister Denise literally planted the saplings many years ago, before Arielle was born. So, that’s why it’s called J & D, for me and my sister Denise,” she said.
J & D Christmas Trees is located at 3629 Third Line Road on Six Nations, and may be reached by phone at 519-732-6548, or through their Facebook page J & D Christmas Trees. The farm will be open to visitors on December 12, 13, 19 and 20 from 10 am to 5 pm.
