Our 2021 season was wonderful! We love our Wildwood families!  We had such a fun time with everyone!

We enjoyed having our Treehouse Play Area open again, although lots of rain kept it closed for a few days during the season.

Our Ball & Burlap trees have become super popular and we LOVE digging them for our families and knowing they will continue to live after being planted after Christmas! All that digging was fun, but tiring.  The picture below shows our “diggers”–David and Poppie heading up for lunch. 

We had a great time with Dawn’s sister and brother-in-law (LoraJoy & Andy) who come every year to help on our farm during Thanksgiving weekend.  It’s such a fun tradition.  They brought some of the yummiest cookies that were decorated so beautifully.  We’re forever thankful for all their help!

The surprise visit from Dawn’s nephew, Landon (LoraJoy & Andy’s son) and Amrika was a precious treasure.  They drove 2 1/2 hours and spent the day.

We had fun with so many families that cut a tree in our fields.

Great fun was had by this family and their children!  The children were “netted” for the ride home along with their tree! hehe!

We had to put out a warning that it was “Reindeer Season!”

We had a lot of help this year and our workers are truly the BEST!  We failed to snap some photos of the crew 😩.

However, we did manage to get a nice family photo from The Cooperator Magazine that gave us such a great write-up.

We were chosen as the #1 Christmas Tree Farm in the Nashville area by Trees.com.  You can read the article here.

We are very thankful for all of you.  Our prayer is that you all have a wonderful 2022 and we hope to see you again for our 2022 Christmas Season!

Well, 2020 has been a year, right?! We were totally blown away by how quickly we sold out of trees!

Thank you all for supporting our small family farm despite the lack of activities this year! We ARE a Christmas tree farm and y’all proved to us that you come for the trees each year and not because we offer so many other fun things. 😁 For that, we are extremely grateful! The activities are to help your family create many cherished memories while you select the perfect tree and we love offering them. We sure missed being able to do them this year, and we are praying we can be back to normal for the 2021 season.

Our online store was a success this year, and made tree selecting and purchasing convenient. We will do it again next year.

An FYI for those of you that didn’t use the website store: Pre-purchasing your tree ensures you get one, even if we sell out early. Dawn picks your tree when the selection is full and we tag it with your name. When you arrive for pickup of your tree, you are welcome to choose a different one in that same size if there are any to choose from. It’s really the best of both worlds!
1. Your tree is chosen from the full selection available.

2. Your tree is here waiting for you whether we sell out or not!

Ball & Burlap tree selection in our online store made it much easier to purchase without two trips to the farm. You could choose your tree from the photos online and set a date to pick it up. This gave us time to dig them and have them ready on the date you selected for pickup.

2020 Wildwood Crew

Enjoy these photos from the season including the snow that arrived right after we closed. It was a definite “Winter Wonderland”…well, as close as you can get in Tennessee. 😊🎄🌲❄️

We are so honored to have been  chosen by The Pioneer Woman as the best Christmas Tree Farm in the state of Tennessee.

You can read her article here: https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/holidays-celebrations/g34479387/best-christmas-tree-farms/

Thanks again for supporting us and we look forward to seeing your family next year!

Merry Christmas from the Gray Family!

On Monday, we planted the last of the Norway Spruce. We had Tuesday and Wednesday off and then we received our last shipment of trees on Wednesday evening. All White Pine trees–1300 total.

The White Pine will all be in the field right off the road; in front of Nanny Boo Boo and Poppie’s house. We planted 1100 there last year and are adding these. Some of these will replace the ones we lost due to the drought.

Click on the video link above to watch David plant a White Pine.

We’re hoping to finish planting by Monday. Next up….fertilizing!

Thanks for reading! Until next time….

Dawn

We have a mighty fine planting crew! They are hard workers and have been putting in loooooong days. They start about 7:30 each morning and work until 7:15ish each evening. They take an hour break at lunch and two morning breaks.

Hello friends and family! It’s planting season on the farm and I thought I’d share some photos with you all.

We are all experiencing a lot of change in our world right now due to the Coronavirus. “Social distancing” has become a new phrase and staying at home 24/7 is the new normal.

We are a homeschool family and the school days have not seen any change for us. However, we are not getting out to parks, co-ops, lunch dates with friends, church events or anywhere, really, except to the grocery store for our online order pick-ups.

We love the internet which is keeping us up to date with friends and allowing us to worship on Sundays with our church family. We’re finding new ways to stay connected! We’re counting our blessings!

We are blessed to live out here on the farm and we have a lot of wide open spaces to run and play and WORK! Ha!

We received two shipments of seedlings this week totaling up to 2100 trees. YIKES! What were we thinking?! That’s a lot of trees to plant.

Today is day 2 of planting. As of noon today 670 trees have been planted. We have a hard-working crew!

So, for those of you worried about the coronavirus and all the new rules of social distancing….all of our trees are planted 6 feet apart! We are exercising social distancing {grin}.

Also note that we only have 5 people planting at a time, maybe 6 (I’m the 6th planter, if and only if, I make it to the fields between cooking all the meals and clean up, AND if I can find my way out from under the mountain of laundry due to all the mud and dirt).

Well, now you know what we’ve been up to! We hope to have all 2100 in the ground by Monday. Our next shipment arrives on Wednesday!

Stay tuned….

Dawn

Good Housekeeping has named Wildwood Christmas Tree Farm as the Best Christmas Tree Farm in Tennessee!!  We are so honored!

Read the article here:   https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/holidays/christmas-ideas/g24485034/christmas-tree-farms-near-me/?fbclid=IwAR0v_2WgjtlkTF3Jplc-OD-S0irSFYJksjK-G2qjwOtqNq63_e4wflgNP7M

Thank you to all of our Christmas tree farm families for making us great!

Spring is such a beautiful time on the farm.  There is so much going on!  Everything seems to experience a new birth.

We got to watch a calf being born to one of Poppie’s Mama cows.  What a joy.  We got a little video as she was getting up for the first time.  Those spindly little legs will not be spindly for long.  The mama cows are very protective.  She doesn’t like us to get very close–she bellows at us.  We think she’s saying “stay back!”

Be sure to click on the link below to experience the joy of this sweet little calf’s first time on four legs.

New Calf

Hello from the farm!

It feels like winter will never end!  We are ready for sunshine and warmth around here although, the snow sure makes for a beautiful view.

We’re expanding!  We’re clearing and preparing a new field on the west side of the gift shop.  It’s what has previously been called “The Bull Pasture”.  This is some acreage that we purchased from Poppie a few years ago.  David and Poppie have been working on clearing this field for over a year now.  They’ve cut down a lot of trees and cleaned up small trees and vines to open the field up to more sunlight. They deem it ready for planting now.  We’re hoping to have space for close to 1000 trees.  David, Caleb and Judah have been laying out the field.  To do this they use golf tees and a measuring tape that’s marked every 6 feet.  They find the row and lay the tape on the ground in a straight line and place golf tees in the ground where we want to dig the hole with the tractor.  The golf tees help Poppie to find where to place the auger when he’s drilling holes and they help us keep the rows of trees straight and tidy.

We’ve also been clearing space for planting more trees just behind the Treehouse Playscape.  It needs some more work to be ready to lay out and plant.  We hope to finish that up really soon, since planting time is upon us.  The rain and mud have been huge obstacles in working in the fields this January/February.

The new field

A different angle of our new field

We’ve been laying out the other fields also.  We ran out of the bright colored golf tees and have been using white and tan ones.  That’s not a lot of help because they’re difficult to see.  So, we’ve been walking the rows and spraying these golf tees with black spray paint to make them show up better.  We do everything we can ahead of time to speed up the planting process.

We need to plant baby trees in about 500 holes in our current 4 fields from last season cuttings.  Then, we’ll start planting the new fields. Sometime this weekend we will be receiving 1000 trees to plant.  This batch of trees is Norway Spruce.  They will take somewhere around 7-8 years to mature to a 6 foot tree.

9 year old Norway Spruce

Our goal is to plant around 250 trees in a 10 hour planting day (I see some epsom salt baths in my future-hehe!).  We’re hoping to have 1000 trees in the ground in 4 days.  David will have to take some time off from his job and we’ll be setting aside the homeschool books.  It’s looking like we’ll have a little bit of help from Boone & Burke this year.  Maybe Aubrey and Turner will help some, too.  Planting days are fun–full of laughter, singing, good food and well, let’s face it, HARD work (maybe a lil groaning, too).  And, Aubrey will be our photographer and you’ll have much better photos to look at in my next few posts.  😀

Aubrey with Turner & Hannah in background

Our next batch of trees will be dug out of transplant fields in Pennsylvania sometime after April 1st.  These 1000 Turkish Fir will ship to us in that first or second week of April.

Please pray for warmer, dryer weather for the next few weeks as we plant trees.  Our fingers and toes thank you!

Thanks for stopping by,

Dawn

We were able to pre-order a new piece of equipment with the help of the Tennessee Agriculture Enhancement Program last fall.  This grant program helps us purchase new equipment and various tools needed to expand our farm.  We were notified last December that we did qualify for the grant and we immediately placed our order.  We have been needing an auger for planting that is small enough to maneuver around in our already established fields.  Once the fields have a few years growth on them, we’re unable to get the tractor in to plant using our current auger.

Poppie using the tractor with auger

We’ve been renting a hand-held auger to dig holes for the past few years.  That gets expensive and these augers kind of beat you up while digging the hole.  You have to hold onto it while it digs, kind of like a jack-hammer.  Not as rough, but after a while you begin to feel it in your back and shoulders.

David with handheld auger

We’ve been grateful to rent one to use instead of a post-hole digger, but we keep saying “Surely, there’s a better way.”

There is a better way-YAY!  We found an Auger Transporter.  It’s an auger on a small platform with wheels.  You move the auger to the spot, set it to dig, and it does all the work for you.  We no longer have to hold it while it digs.  Since it’s on wheels we can easily move it around the fields instead of having to carry it.  We’ve been waiting on it to be manufactured in Pennsylvania.  We got the news last week that it was shipped and would be arriving soon.

It’s here!!!  We’re so excited that it arrived in time for planting this year.  We can’t wait to show you pictures of it in operation!

Auger Transporter

Stay tuned for planting updates!

Thanks for stopping by,

Dawn