O CHRISTMAS TREE, O CHRISTMAS TREE
It begins around 14 December: The extremely short season for Austrian Christmas tree growers. That’s when they finish off the columns of customers at home on the farm and take it in turns to saw, pack and make change from early in the morning until late at night. Or they can be found in one of the many open spaces that are transformed into Christmas tree markets across Austria for a good ten days. Martin Breitenberger can also be found at one of them, having booked his space this year on the premises of the Schnaitl private brewery in Gundertshausen. After all, the Christmas tree business is the second great passion of the sales ace from Mareiner, who grew up in the Innviertel region. His family’s forestry business is also located there, near Braunau, in the green solitude of the forest. In 1986, his mother started the side business of growing Christmas trees. Her son Martin has been running it for around 15 years. On one hectare, he has around 7,000 prospective Christmas trees in all sizes and a wide variety of species: Representatives of the Turkish and other firs, but above all various subspecies of the Nordmann fir. It is the undisputed favourite in Austrian households.
NEW PATRIOTISM
The proverbial tree is still put up in seven out of ten houses and flats at Christmas. This adds up to a total of 2.8 million Christmas trees every year, twelve per cent of which are allegedly made of plastic. In the mid-1990s, one in five evergreens was still being imported. Above all from Denmark with its agro-industrialised Christmas tree production. Today, around 2.5 million trees in Austria come from domestic plantations every year. In 1990, these totalled just 930 hectares of cultivated land. In the meantime, the addition already totals 3,500 hectares.
Regionality is key: according to a survey by the Chamber of Agriculture, over 80 per cent of Christmas tree sellers are asked about the origin of their forest products. Martin Breitenberger, on the other hand, is hardly ever asked where his trees come from: ‘I almost only have regular customers who know where our forest is located.’ All the more so as the Breitenberger family held their Christmas tree market directly on the plantation until two years ago. With horse-drawn carriage rides, mulled wine and all the trimmings. This was too much effort, not least because of Breitenberger’s double workload, which is why the trained forester switched to selling in the village. ‘On 8 December, I cut up a basic stock, which I add to as required every morning before sales start at ten o’clock,’ explains Breitenberger. He doesn’t use the red-white-red ribbon of origin for his trees: for someone like him, the high advertising costs are not worth it. Instead, he runs his own advertising line.
A NICE POCKET MONEY
With its 7,000 trees, Breitenberger is one of the smallest on the market. Most Austrian Christmas tree growers cultivate two or three hectares. Almost all of them do so as a sideline; only a few really big ones make a living exclusively from the business. ‘No one has ever got rich from it,’ says Martin Breitenberger, who was manager of the Styrian Forest Association before joining Mareiner. But it’s certainly a good way to earn some pocket money: In Lower Austria, where more than half of the production area is located, the added value from cultivation, care and sales amounts to 22 million euros a year. Styria, where Breitenberger is currently planting another small Christmas tree plantation, is in second place with 17 per cent of the area under cultivation. Upper Austria is in third place with ten per cent.
Around 80 hours per year and hectare are spent on Christmas tree forestry work, according to calculations in Bavaria. ‘I cut each of my trees five to seven times every year,’ says Breitenberger. The lion’s share of Breitenberger’s holiday is spent on this – and on the Christmas business. This doesn’t bother the busy Styrian-by-choice, as time in the forest is the perfect balance to his communication- and travel-intensive sales business: ‘In our forest, the nearest neighbour is a kilometre away and I can totally relax in the silence and with the manual work.’
CUT AND PINCH
Most of the manual work in the Christmas tree plantations consists of regulating and correcting tree growth. Unlike in the wild, the saplings are not allowed to shoot upwards as quickly as possible. Instead, the sap flow in the leading shoot is pinched off with pliers so that it does not grow too far away from the side shoots. The side shoots, in turn, are regulated by pinching off the outer shoots so that the tree grows with regular roundness and in the ideal triangular shape from the top to the lower branches. However, Breitenberger has noticed that his customers are attaching less and less importance to this:
In addition to pruning, tying up and splinting the trees, keeping the ground vegetation in check is a considerable amount of work for the forest farmers: if the grass grows too high, the lower branches that make the tree so bushy die off. Mowing the plantation is the only thing that Breitenberger does not do himself, but has it done by a contractor. The freshly cut grass is left lying around as a soil fertiliser. More and more of Breitenberger’s colleagues are letting flocks of Shropshire sheep graze in their plantations. The peeling and gnawing instinct of other sheep breeds is alien to Shropshires. They are the only ones who have no culinary interest in fresh conifer shoots. Instead of feasting on the trees, the four-legged alternative to the brush cutter only keeps the grass and weeds short and fertilises the soil with their excrement at the same time.
LONG GROWING, fast consumption
As in many other plantations, fertiliser is hardly ever used in Martin Breitenberger’s forest. Except occasionally in certain areas. Or when the Hallimasch fungus, which is feared by forest farmers, spreads on the trees and causes white rot: ‘Only chemical fertilisers help against this.’ Otherwise, synthetic chemicals are taboo in Breitenberger’s Christmas tree area. This makes Breitenberger one of the many Christmas tree growers who produce organic quality trees without official certification.
Organic is the Achilles heel of the Austrian Christmas tree industry: there is still no standardised organic seal. Unlike with food, consumers’ awareness of organic Christmas trees is still barely developed. Quite a few farmers still spray their plantations with glyphosate, a weed killer that kills bees, among other things, and some also resort to chemical insecticide. Breitenberger doesn’t need anything like that: the biodiversity in his plantation is the best protection against pests. Foxes, badgers and birds of prey keep the rodents at bay.
OXYGEN DISPENSER, CO2 BINDER
And there is something else to be added to the good ecological balance of Breitenberger’s Christmas tree forest: The one hectare alone binds at least 95 and up to 143 tonnes of CO2 in ten years. Over the same period, it produces 70 to 105 tonnes of oxygen.
However, no matter how organically or conventionally a Christmas tree farm operates, the risk of forestry failure is 20 to 30 per cent: if a bird snaps the leading shoot in the top of a fir tree, the tree is as good as unsaleable. Drought, late frost and vole activity are fatal for many of the young trees that Breitenberger receives from local nurseries. They grow fir seeds, mainly from Georgia, Turkey and other regions in the Middle East, into seedlings and then into young plants. When they are three or four years old, they become interesting for Breitenberger and the industry. It takes a further nine to ten years of intensive cultivation and care after planting before they grow into a two-metre-high magnificent fir tree for Christmas – a quick business given the growth and development prospects that are otherwise usual in forestry.
The actual useful life of a Christmas tree stands in stark contrast to the fact that it grows up for over ten years: after two or three weeks as a spruced-up living decoration in the living room, the Christmas tree’s existence comes to an end. This is because Christmas trees are disposable items. In Vienna alone, 700 tonnes of fir trees are collected after New Year’s Eve, which are transformed into district heating in the biomass power plant. In the countryside, horses and goats take particular delight in chewing and destroying the green leftovers from the festivities.
But long before the heating plant or the livestock feast on Martin Breitenberger’s trees, they bring joy to his friends: ‘I personally bring them all a tree as a Christmas present.’ Breitenberger also gives part of his harvest to his old home community and the town of Kapfenberg, which passes on his Innviertel fir trees to low-income families. With a little help from Mareiner: When Breitenberger drives his fine conifers from the Innviertel region to Styria, he gets behind the wheel of the Mareiner timber market transporter.
- When buying, pay attention to the cut surface: freshly cut trees are very light in colour. Dark cut surfaces are not a good sign.
- When you shake the tree, no green needles should fall off.
- Pruned trees are also living organisms that need water: In a heated living room, 2 litres or more a day!
- Christmas trees cut 3 days before the 11th full moon stay fresh for longer. Ask about the time of felling.
- Trim the bottom of the tree again before putting it up.
- If your Christmas tree has a reasonably thick trunk, carve vertical slits in it with a Stanley knife – and then smell the fragrant difference.