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Christmas tree farms struggle with near-record rainfall, flooding

Five-year-old Reiss Malo admired a freshly harvested tree at MerriHill Tree Farm in Merrimac in 2016. This year, cutting down your own holiday decoration at a local tree farm may be complicated by the year’s heavy rainfalls. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff, file 2016

For many families around New England, picking out a Christmas tree at a local farm can be one of the highlights of the holiday season. But this year, near-record rainfall has put a damper on the arboreal tradition at some of the region’s popular tree farms.

“People came, looked at [the parking lot], and left,” said Dan Pierce, owner of Pierce’s Tree Farm in Lunenburg, whose parking lot turned into a thick, muddy marsh after Thanksgiving. “I don’t blame them; you just couldn’t get through the lot. It was so bad you just couldn’t move in here.”

Pierce’s cut-your-own-tree farm and others like it have fallen victim this season to extreme and prolonged rainfall events that have brought major New England cities like Boston, Worcester, Hartford, and Providence to near-record rainfall totals for the fall, according to the National Weather Service.

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By the end of November, all four of those cities had received their second- or third-highest rainfall totals for the month since the weather service began recording rainfall data.

“I’ve never seen it this wet. This is an exceptional year,” Pierce said. “I think most farms have been scrambling.”

The mud and flooding forced Tonry Christmas Tree Farm in Hampton Falls, N.H., to close for a holiday season weekend for the first time in 54 years. The family-owned farm received 10 inches of rain in November alone, oversaturating the soil and creating hazardous conditions at the farm for the last weekend of the month, according to a statement posted on the farm’s Facebook page.

For an industry that depends so heavily on the business it gets during a select few weeks of the year, having to close down for a weekend can be detrimental, said Michael Casto, a manager at Houde’s Christmas Tree Farm in Marlborough, which, like Pierce’s, has been able to stay open.

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“Having to close during one of these seasons, it can make or break your season,” he said. “If one weekend turns out to be a flop, it could make for a tough overall year.”

Losing a weekend in late November or early December could cost Pierce’s Tree Farm about 45 percent of its total revenue, Pierce said. He worked hard last week to avoid having to close the farm, as he laid about 300 tons of stone on the muddy parking lot to make it once again maneuverable, he said.

But after several consecutive days of sunshine this week, Pierce is expecting twice as many customers than usual Sunday.

“It’s a double-edged sword this year,” he said. “This is the big weekend.”


Andres Picon can be reached at andres.picon@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @andpicon.