{"id":33,"date":"2014-02-05T22:45:12","date_gmt":"2014-02-05T22:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/?p=33"},"modified":"2014-03-11T00:07:48","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T00:07:48","slug":"fouchs-christmas-tree-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/2014\/02\/05\/fouchs-christmas-tree-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Fouch\u2019s Christmas Tree Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mia Pohlman<\/a>\u00a0| November 8, 2013<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>
Photo by Mia Pohlman<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Janie Fouch helps families celebrate the Christmas spirit. For the past 30 years, she and her husband David have run\u00a0Fouch\u2019s Christmas Tree Farm<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Kirksville, Mo<\/a>., with the help of their six children and David\u2019s parents. They started the farm to get their family involved in a project together and to earn money for their children\u2019s college funds. Today, their 20-acre farm is home to 9,000\u00a0Scotch<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0white pines<\/a>\u00a0that families \u2014 many of which are lifelong customers \u2014 come each November and December to buy.<\/p>\n

Randy Mikel and his family are some of these lifelong customers. Randy, his wife Shirley, their five daughters and three of their son-in-laws have been coming to Fouch\u2019s Christmas tree farm for 20 years. The Mikels enjoy the tradition, smell and feel of putting up a live tree in their home. Randy says he loves the setting at Fouch\u2019s Christmas Tree Farm.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe walk through the acreage trying to find the perfect tree, measuring, cutting, half of our group at one side of the field, the other half at the other \u2026 it literally turns into an expedition,\u201d Randy says. \u201cThose are memories, you just can\u2019t replace those.\u201d<\/p>\n

In order to help families create these memories, the Fouch\u2019s work nearly all year round\u2013 from April to December. They can spend up to 80 hours per week caring for the trees.<\/p>\n

Beginning in April, the Fouch\u2019s mow the grounds and plant new saplings, spraying herbicide around them so weeds don\u2019t prevent them from growing. Throughout the summer, they continue to mow the grounds and prune the new trees. Trees that are at least three years old are sheared with a Christmas tree shearer, which Janie says looks like a long Weed-Eater. In the fall, the Fouch\u2019s spray some of the trees again to improve their color. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, the Fouch\u2019s open the tree farm for business. They shape the Christmas trees for customers, shake out the dead needles and tie the trees with twine.<\/p>\n

On the farm, Janie helps David spray the trees. She explains her real passion, however, is making wreaths from the branches pruned off the Christmas trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cI definitely don\u2019t have a green thumb. I like to make the wreaths and to decorate the wreaths,\u201d Janie says.<\/p>\n

She begins making bows for the wreaths during September and has 250 bows made before what she and her family refer to as \u201ctree field season\u201d \u2014 the time between Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas when customers buy trees from their farm. She makes the wreaths from greenery that customers don\u2019t want on the bottom of their tree and from trees that aren\u2019t sellable. David brings the greens in to Janie, who cuts them to the size she needs, clamps them into a wreath design and then decorates them with the bows. It takes Janie 30 minutes to make one wreath. Customers then buy the wreaths from the farm and also custom-order them.<\/p>\n

Besides decorating wreaths, Janie decorates three of her own live Christmas trees each year. She decorates the tree that sits on her porch with lights only, and the two indoor trees with the ornaments her children made throughout the years while they were growing up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m still into tacky kid trees and I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever get away from that. \u2026 It\u2019s just so much fun getting them out every year, because you forget about things,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Janie keeps her trees up from Thanksgiving until the middle of January. In order to keep them alive this long, she shaves off bark from the bottom of the tree after it has been transported from the farm to her house. The tree seals itself over if it is out of the ground for too long and shaving away some of the bark allows the tree to drink water again. Janie says the trees need a gallon of water per day for the first few days. After that, the amount of water they require is less, but she says it is still important to take time to keep them watered.<\/p>\n

Janie and David planted Christmas trees for the last time during spring 2013 and plan to be in the Christmas tree business for another 10 years as the last round of trees matures for sale.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you had it to do all over again, would you still have a tree farm?\u201d Janie asks David while he takes a break from pruning the trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think,\u201d David says, laughing.<\/p>\n

Because of the amount of work it takes, Janie says that 90 percent of new Christmas tree farms don\u2019t make it long enough for the trees to mature for sale. The work Janie and her family have put into their farm, as well as their enthusiasm for sharing the Christmas spirit with each other and other families, has made the Fouch\u2019s Christmas tree farm one of the exceptions.<\/p>\n

For more about Fouch\u2019s Christmas Tree Farm, pick up our Winter 2013 issue, also available on iTunes for tablet.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mia Pohlman\u00a0| November 8, 2013 Janie Fouch helps families celebrate the Christmas spirit. For the past 30 years, she and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-activities","category-stories","category-travel-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmn.truman.edu\/detoursadaircounty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}