Oh the weather outside is frightful — enough to kill off Christmas trees.
Yuletide firs are dying from a severe drought that’s plagued parts of the Northeast for weeks — with some farmers losing 25% of this year’s crop and predicting a future shortage, according to WBZ-TV.
“They’re all yellow on the inside. The needles are falling off,” said Chris Moran, who runs Vandervalk Farm in Mendon, Massachusetts. “Without water we can’t grow anything.”
Dry weather killed roughly 500 of his 2,700 Christmas tree seedlings — fragile, 1-foot-tall babies — after they were planted past spring, he said.
“I shouldn’t lose that many, I should lose ten trees,” Moran said of an average year.
The farm’s larger, stronger firs, planted 10 to 15 years ago, weren’t hurt by the drought — meaning folks won’t notice a shortage or price increase in the Big Apple this Christmas season.
Instead, he predicted a shortage in 10 years, when this year’s dead seedlings would have been full grown, he said.
“In ten years, I have 25 or 20 percent less of my product to sell,” said Moran, whose family farm grows about 10,000 trees on 10 acres.
Moran blames climate change for parched his pines, which last year were swamped with too much rain, he said.
“You just can’t win,” he said.
In central Pennsylvania, Christmas tree farmer Jeff Hill said his thirsty younger trees have also been dying off due to lack of rain.
“You can see the root system just doesn’t go deep enough to get the moisture and a lot of them just can’t hang on, you can see the dead trees there in the field,” Hill, of Orwigsburg, told wnep.com
He predicts a major shortage in five or six years.
“This is where we really get hurt, and there’s a shortage of Christmas trees, and this keeps the shortage going on because you can’t get your new ones to survive,” said Hill.
Farms in the Northeast, where much of the Big Apple’s Christmas tree supply is grown, were hit with a record dry-spell over the past several weeks.
This past October was the second driest in New York City’s recorded history, prompting water citywide conservation warnings.
Forecasters this week said the drought is going to get worse before it gets better in much of the tri-state area.
