Drought forces popular Mississippi Coast Christmas tree farm to close for 2023 season

Drought has descended on another Mississippi Coast crop this season: Christmas trees.

The popular Gartman’s Christmas Tree Farm in Saucier will close for the rest of the year, its owners announced on Facebook this week. The weather is so extreme, they said, that trees are struggling to grow and the farm must wait a season to give the surviving ones a fighting chance.

The closure comes after a cold winter and punishing summer of heat with little rain.

Kevin Steele, incoming president of the Southern Christmas Tree Association, would like to set the record straight: Christmas is not canceled.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

Steele, who owns a Christmas tree farm in Louisiana, said his trees seemed pristine after the Southern Christmas Tree Association’s convention in early August. But the summer drought combined with “ridiculous heat I’ve never seen in my 70 years of being on this earth,” he said, added extra stress.

The conditions ultimately forced Gartman’s to close for the season. Hurricanes and rain soaked the ground over the past few years and forced them to cut down trees. But this summer veered so far in the opposite direction that some farms barely got rain at all.

Gartman’s hopes to reopen in 2024 and recommended customers buy trees from Holly Berry Hills Christmas Tree Farm in the meantime.

Holly Berry Hills, also in Saucier. has troubles too. It has rained less than an inch in the past month, said owner Mike Haley, so he started spraying his trees. He trimmed them. He tried everything.

But 260 still died.

“If it don’t get better soon we’re gonna wind up closing,” the Harrison County business owner said. “It’s been really tough.”

The ground, he added, is so dry that even when it rains the water just runs off.

Farms across the Coast have struggled in the summer weather. Coastal Ridge Farm in Hancock County also recently closed through at least September, and most of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties are under “extreme drought,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

A popular Christmas tree farm in Louisiana closed last week too, sparking widespread worry among customers that the holiday season might come without enough trees.

Steele said every Christmas tree farmer he knows always plants more trees than they sell, so he expects most farms will survive.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s been a challenge. But it’s nothing we won’t overcome.”