Kraig Kilcollins will be spending most of December selling Christmas trees at the Presque Isle Shop & Save parking lot, running the mobile retail setup for Tom Trafford’s Mars Hill tree farm.
“I’ll be here 24/7. The only time I go is to go use the bathroom,” said Kilcollins. “If I’m not around and the lights aren’t on, knock on the door and I’ll come.”
Kilcollins has worked at Trafford’s Christmas tree farm for three years and this year was asked to run the retail set up in the parking lot of the often busy Marden’s and Shop n’ Save stores. “Tom’s giving me the reins to let me try this out.”
Equipped with a heated camper trailer, Kilcollins will be selling hundreds of balsam, douglas and fraser fir trees to people bringing the evergreen trees into their homes during the darkest days of the year. Some days Kilcollins’ 6-year-old son Gavin joins him, hanging out and helping him clear snow from the walkways and the rows of trees.
With about 8 to 10 years to grow to maturity and ideal conditions, Christmas trees have been a decent investment for landowners in the last few decades, including for former potato fields lying fallow, and Aroostook County has become a notable producer of Christmas trees in the Northeast U.S.
In 2012, according to information from the National Agriculture Statistics Service, 43 Christmas tree farms in Aroostook County sold more than 81,000 trees raised on about 1,400 acres. That brought in $1.3 million in sales, about 25 percent of all Maine Christmas tree sales that year.
Deep In The Woods, the Oxbow tree farm and craft store run by Judy and Steve Sherman, has sold trees to out-of-state markets for years, though this year is mostly sourcing Aroostook County vendors like Maple Meadow Farms in Mapleton, with some sold to Pleasant View Tree Farm of Houlton heading to markets to the south.
Other businesses selling Christmas trees in central Aroostook County include Myrtle Tree Farm in Presque Isle, Bob Tweedie of Westfield and Triple E Christmas Tree & Wreath Farm in Easton.
The experience of a late-fall trip north also draws some downstate Mainers to The County to buy their Christmas trees. In recent years, a group from Belfast has been making the trip to Deep In The Woods, this year buying 10, the Shermans said.
