Making Money during Christmas Season

Christmas season provides us with some extra income outside of our main season. Scott talks about what we do and why you might want to try it.

Episode Transcript

(00:11):
Hey, everybody's Scott Terry here,and you are listening to the Scott Terry
Show. And this is a showwhere we talk about homesteadying, the grarian
living, entrepreneurship, perma culture,horticulture, all sorts of stuff. And
I haven't released an episode in awhile, and that was primarily because Christmas

(00:38):
season just happened, and I keepforgetting every year I say, oh,
I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep upwith the podcaster and they're really part of
winter, and of course it isn'teven winner yet, but you know what
I mean. Then it never happensbecause Christmas season here is very, very

(01:03):
busy, and so I thought Iwould do an episode. Well it's all
still fresh in my mind, andnot just all the rosy stuff, but
the the good, the bad andthe ugly where we could talk about how
you can use wreath making how tomake money during the Christmas season. So

(01:34):
there's a bunch of reasons why thisactually fits. It was a good fit
for a lot of people in myaudience who have seasonal businesses or are trying
to find different ways to make moneyfrom home. Seasonal in the like in

(02:00):
our in our regard here we makemost of our money in the spring.
We still make money through the summer, in the fall and during Christmas season,
but we're very seasonal in that morethan fifty percent of our income comes

(02:29):
from May first to May thirtieth,So fifty of our gross sales comes in
a thirty day period in May.But there's also all there's all kinds of

(02:50):
things that have to be done hereduring the rest of the season. It's
just that the income isn't coming in. And there's a lot of businesses like
that. Say you're a market garden, for instance, your primarily late spring
through summer, a little bit offall business with some of your fall crops,

(03:16):
but it's nice to have something todo there at the tail end at
the end of the year. Keepseverybody busy and you can make a little
more make a little more income.Another another reason is employee attention. If

(03:39):
your business is big enough that youhave employees, and you're kind of a
seasonal based business, you can havesome really good employees that are extremely valuable
to you. But if you're goingto not have any work for them for
December, January, February, youknow, whatever it is, they might

(04:01):
find employment somewhere else where, theydon't get laid off for three months.
So anytime that you can take reallykey employees in your business and keep them
busy for an extra couple of months, which is really what happens during Christmas
season. It's almost a two monthmarathon. And that's a way that you

(04:26):
could take someone and say hey,you want to stay on help us with
this work through the season. Thenthey're more likely to stay on with you
because they're not going through a bigdrought where they don't have any have any
money either, and it could helpwith employee retention. So yeah, like

(04:51):
I said, our business here ishorticulture, and so obviously by November and
December we're not doing much and nothaving a lot of not having a lot
of sales. So Christmas season givesus gives us an extra chunk and actually

(05:14):
the profit, the profit from Christmasseason here is enough to pay our fuel
bills to get all the greenhouse productiongoing in the spring, So we'll we'll
be starting probably mid February, startingto grow Mother's Day baskets and starting six

(05:38):
inch geraniums and stuff like that.This gives us a gives us some more
time, another income stream, andso that's why we do it. And
I tried to give some examples ofyou know, like a market garden business,
even people that are doing direct marketingmeat and stuff. It's just a

(06:01):
nice little extra way to make money. And if you're just a homesteader family
that's looking for extra income that couldpay your property taxes, this could do
it. So what do I meanby Christmas Season as a business. So

(06:26):
for us, it's kind of athree three pronged thing here. For us,
we have Christmas tree sales, Sothat includes trees that we grow here
that are on our tree farm thatpeople can go out and walk through the

(06:53):
woods find the trees they want,and then they mark it and we cut
it down and drag it out withthe tractor for them up their vehicle.
There's also pre cut Christmas trees,which is another ball of wax all together.
That's so we can't grow fraser furtrees here, and there's a pretty

(07:15):
good market for people that want fraserfur, and there's a good market for
people that want pre cut trees.They don't want to go trapesing around in
the woods through the snow with theirkids and picking out a tree. So
those trees, we actually buy awholesale and then set them out, mark

(07:36):
them up and sell them. Sothat's the tree end of the business.
The other end is brush sails.So to make wreaths, garland, kissing
ball, all that kind of stuff, you have to have what we call
brush, which is branches or boughsout of different species of trees. And

(08:01):
so we have a pretty good apretty good market for that too, So
we're actually like supplying. Some ofthem are our competitors who don't have access
to certain stuff. We sell Scotchpine, white pine, white spruce,

(08:24):
a little bit of balsam, butI'll explain why we only sell a little
bit of balsam and cedar. Sowe sell all of those and forty pound
bundles and some of our clientele forthat is the prison has a horticulture department,

(08:48):
and I'm not exactly sure why theprisoners are making wreaths, but that's
something that they do and they buytheir brush from us BOSS kind of like
the special ed division of BOSS uphere. Their kids make wreaths and garland

(09:11):
and they learn a skill, theylearn a little marketing, and it helps
their program. They sell the stuffand so we actually sell quite a bit
to them. And then I've gotjust families that like to make their own
Christmas wreaths and like to make theirown garland and stuff that buy smaller amounts.

(09:37):
So that's one end of Christmas salesand something that you can do.
And then the other is retailing anda little bit of whole sailing of wreaths,
garland, kissing balls, door swags. I'm trying to think if there's

(10:01):
those are the main ones, andso that that's probably well, I'd say
that's probably fifty percent of our business. And then the trees, both the
trees we grow and the trees webuy wholesale and resell as another fifty percent.
I'm kind of the trees and thewreaths thing go together. So if

(10:26):
you're gonna get into making wreaths,it would be wise probably, As I
kind of think this out, alot of people will come to buy their
Christmas tree, and then they seeour wreath displays and then they come over
and as all along with the Christmastree, they buy other stuff. But

(10:54):
we also have people that call inNovember ordering reaths and ordering so many feet
of garland and ordering this stuff aheadof time. So that there is a
market for doing it outside of thetrees, but I think having trees probably

(11:16):
would increase your probability of having bettersales. So what exactly does a wreathmaking
business look like? Because like,I had no idea when we bought this
place. We bought it primarily forthe horticulture into things, the greenhouses and

(11:39):
the trees and and but it camewith one wreathmaking machine, and it came
with a bunch of inventory of ringsand stuff. And so we're like,
well, well, I guess becausewhen we bought it, that was our

(12:00):
first season was Christmas season, andpeople had already been coming out here for
forty years to buy their Christmas stuff. So we're like, well, we
better dive right into this and figureout how to do it. So this
was our third Christmas season this year, and I think we really got to

(12:20):
dialed in this year. It wasreally successful season. We sold a lot
of trees out of our field.We sold one hundred and two pre cut
trees that we had bought wholesale,and not everybody was so lucky to sell

(12:41):
out of their pre cut trees.I've been driving around, and I mean
the hardware stores and stuff around here. Have still got piles of trees sitting
around. But in the way theprofit margin is on reselling trees, it
wouldn't take having too many left overto wipe out your whole profit. But

(13:09):
we've been we've been blessed that we'vesold out all three years that we've done
it, and this year we boughta lot extra, but we still sold
out, so that was good.And then you know, I don't even
know where I was going to that. Uh So the wreath, the wreath

(13:31):
making end of it. What youone. You need a place, a
place to work that's warm. Wehave. This is why I think like
a market garden people. If you'vegot if you've got a heated hoop house

(13:56):
where you start stuff, a greenhousewhere he starts up in the spring,
it's a great place to do it. We use a hoop style greenhouse house
thirteen that has a wood furnace anlittle workshop thing off the back of it.
The furnace room is fairly big,concrete floor. We store a lot
of stuff in there, and that'swhat we use. It's probably big.

(14:24):
Greenhouse is probably only fifty fifty feetlong, and it's perfect. Line tables
up on both sides as workstations,and we have a reath machine at each
end. Like I said, wehad a reef machine that came with the
place, and then last year webought a second machine and they make things

(14:46):
go go a lot quicker. Youcould do it by hand. If you
wanted to material for making wreaths,you want to use balsam. For balsam
is really the kind of top ofthe line brush to use and wreaths for

(15:09):
both needle retention and it's easy towork with. It's soft. I know,
I sell white spruce brush to peopleand they're happy with it and they
come back every year, but whitespruce needle retention is not very good.

(15:31):
You can do mixed greens. Andone of the big restaurant hotel resorts down
on the river, it's a verygood customer of ours. We do all
of their Christmas stuff and they getmixed green wreaths which are balsam, cedar
and white pine mixed together and they'rereally gorgeous. It's really really nice when

(16:00):
you can mix some cedar in there. But anyway, the main thing that
you use in that is balsam.As far as garland production goes, you
gotta have white pine. We dowhite pine and balsam and the machines.
To get back to the reef machines, there's a clamping style machine that I'm

(16:25):
not at all familiar with. Oneof my competitors has one, and I've
seen them advertised. I've never usedone, and i've never seen one in
operation, so I really can't saywhether they're good or they're not good.
Obviously some people prefer them. Weuse a Kelco and it's a wire a

(16:56):
wire spool machine, and what itactually does is it just it's got a
motor on it and it wraps thelawyer for you around your ring. So
any wreath two foot and under wecan make on our machines, and if

(17:23):
you've got a skilled person on themachine, you can really turn out a
lot of a lot of reds.You got your if you got your bundles
or brush all set and stacked up, it's like usually bending on what size
reads, but the average is likethree three pieces per bundle that are gonna

(17:45):
go on the ring wrap it.Then your next three pieces that are in
a bundle are gonna go over topof that cover up where you're tied off
the last one and that's and Iget tied off well with the machine.
You set that on top of theother piece, hit your foot pedal and

(18:07):
ith and it wraps it, andit wraps it super tight, and it
does it in seconds. And thenyou flop your next one on, hit
your foot pedal and it wraps it. Hit your foot pedal, and you
gotta be careful because you don't wantto get your finger cut in there if

(18:30):
you do, if you're smart,no one goes around once you take your
foot off of the thing. Ifyou're a complete idiot and you just wrap
it several times, it won't usuallytake your finger off. But what I
understand is it's usually the reflex whereyou jerk your finger out and it'll skin

(18:55):
your finger. So I've been we'vebeen blessed here. There's been no no
major accidents with the wreath making machinesas far as catching fingers in it.
But I know I've come I've comeclose quite a few times with it.
But anyway, that's how a wreathmaking machine works. So like anything,

(19:21):
eight inch, ten inch, twelveinch, eighteen inch, those can all
be made on the machine, andthey can all be made fairly quickly.
A machine like that new I'm guessingis selling for one thousand to fifteen hundred
maybe somewhere in there. I don'tknow. For sir, I picked up

(19:47):
a used one last year for likeyou know, like six fifty or something,
if you can find them. Butthey're a real game changer as far
as being able to turn out alot of product. So you don't have

(20:07):
to have evergreens and a Christmas treefarm to make reeds, because you can
buy balsam brush by the ton,and so we make so many wreaths here
that we can't produce it all hereon this farm, so we actually buy
This year, we bought a tonand a half. Last year he bought

(20:30):
two tons, but somewhere between aton and a half and two ton of
balsam branches, though you can imaginehow many wreaths that that amounts to.
And so like to give you kindof an idea of how production even works.

(20:55):
Like so you get there, yougot a machine, and you got
rings, and you've got all yourdecorations. You got to have pine cones
and berries and ribbon to make bowsand different kinds of pine cones, some

(21:18):
of them painted so they're frosted they'rekind of my favorite plain pine cones.
And when I say berries, they'renot really berries. We call them berries.
They make white ones, red ones, maroon ones, gold ones,
and we actually buy them by ridiculousgiant boxes full of them. And there's

(21:45):
actually like pine cones. There's peoplethat like pine comb production. It's like
a byproduct of getting the seed outof the pine cones to start new pine
trees. And we get the enormousboxes of Australian they're sorry, Austrian,

(22:07):
I believe pine cones. So anyway, you've got all of that, all
of that stuff, what's kind ofthe workshop look like? How do you
how do you start with a pileof balsam brush and a bunch of decorations
and start turning out product. Sofor us, at least in this climate,

(22:30):
we can get away with starting thefirst of November. And so the
first week in November, we've gotour brush here, we got everything set
up. We've spent a week gettingthe workshop set up, fire up the
wood stove. And the first stepis you've got to have a crew that

(22:51):
cuts brush. So you drag theseforty pound bundles of brush in, cut
them open and all the different Soto do this efficiently, you've got to
make lots of different kinds of wreaths, garland doorswags. But you got to

(23:18):
make all the different sizes of wreaths, from four footers all the way down
to eight inch wreaths. And soI guess it might even help if I

(23:40):
explained. So wreaths are measured bythe diameter of their ring. So a
twelve inch wreath, if you tookthe ring, the metal ring that's in
the center that you're tying everything offon, and you took a tape measure,
that would be exactly twelve inches across. So obviously, when you got

(24:02):
the brush on there, a twelveinch wreath could be four to six inches,
probably a good six inches wider thanthe ring size. And that's where
this gets kind of I don't knowwhy why they do this in the business,

(24:23):
but so you've got I can understanda twelve inch ring has there's twelve
inches, we'll call that a twelveinch wreath. Is great. You've got
to cut the brush into all thesedifferent sizes to fit these different size wreaths,
and but the brush that you useis approximately one half the size of

(24:52):
the ring. So we have barrelsset up. We take fifty five gallon
plastic barrels and we cut them inhalf, and we drill holes in them,
and we put rope handles on them, and we have lots and lots
of these things, and we've gotsome chairs and a thirty pack of beer,

(25:15):
and everybody's got Falco pruning shears.Don't cheap out on your pruning shears.
These Falco pruning shears are expensive,but it is well well worth having
good, good pruning shears, oryour life will be miserable. So you

(25:41):
sit around all these barrels, andthe barrels will say eight inch, twelve
inch eighteen inch one foot two footfour foot garland. Now, when you're

(26:03):
cutting, you take a branch andyou've got it's a fine art to learn
how to get the most product outof that branch. But back to the
barrels. An eight inch barrel takesa four inch long piece of brush,
a twelve inch barrel takes a sixinch long piece of brush, and on

(26:33):
down the line. Everything is abouthalf the size of what the stated figure
on the barrel is. And soyou sit there and you cut. Okay,
well I can get and then yougot to know. It also helps
to know to talk to the girlsthat are working on stuff, what do

(26:56):
we need today, Well, we'rewe've got plenty of this, we got
plenty of that, and we're reallylow on twelve inch. So twelve inch
is popular because twelve inch reads arepopular and kissing balls are super super popular,
and they use twelve inch brush aswell. So we're always low on

(27:18):
twelve inch brush. So some dayswhen production is getting held up because we
don't have enough brush, I mightmake more twelve inch brush where I could
have turned that piece into an eighteenor I could have turned it in to

(27:41):
a one foot, but I couldgo in there and carefully cut and get
a couple of twelves out of it. And so I mean you learn as
you go how to do that.But so your brush cutting crew is super
important because that's like it's like theleast the least sexy job of the whole

(28:07):
operation, but it's also almost themost important because one, if you don't
have material cut and ready for theproduction people, no production happens. Two
brush is not cheap. Balsam brushthis year I think was like eight fifty

(28:30):
nine a ton, So you've gotto make every one of those branches yield
the most amount of material that youcan. You don't want to end up
with stuff left it because there's somestuff that if you're not careful the way
you cut it, you'll end upwith pieces that aren't good for anything.
And then they go in the garbagepile and that can go get run through

(28:52):
a chipper and be made into mulch. So that's it's not a total loss,
but there's a lot cheaper ways getmulched then grinding up nine dollars a
ton of material. So anyway,so you that crew is important. It's
not a bad job. A lotof times that's one of my jobs.

(29:15):
And you can sit there and sipon beer and listen to country music or
RJ. Rushdoony sermons or lectures andor depends who you got there. If
there's good storytellers sitting and shooting thebreeze and telling stories and getting stuff cut.

(29:37):
So next next on the line isthe people that are actually producing the
reads. So you got your peopleon the machine, and you might have
the younger kids working on building bundlestacks. So if you want your machine
people to be productive, they shouldn'tbe stopping and putting together bundles. And

(30:03):
you gotta have your bundles built aheadof time, so we use probably two
foot by two foot by two footsquare boards. We start at the base
and you make your bundles three piecesthat complement each other that there's a little

(30:25):
bit of art putting those together.You stack them across the board, lay
a strip piece of newspaper, youput another stack over that, you put
a piece of newspaper. You cango about five six high on those and
build these piles, all these stacksof material so that when the when the

(30:45):
person's on the machine making reads,they can just reach over, grab it,
flop it down, hit the pedal, ship, grab a ben.
That's how you get If you gotsomebody and they're sitting there making their own
bundles and phiddl Fartner, nothing getsdone. You've got efficiency, and this

(31:07):
is very important because you've got fromthe first to November to the first of
December to get everything done. Now, from the first to December to about
the fifteenth of December is about whenpeople quit. You know, that's when
people start and when they quit buyingReeve's garland, kissing balls, door swags,

(31:33):
all that stuff after the fifteenth,it really starts to taper off.
Now, this year was an oddyear because people were buying that kind of
stuff right up until Christmas Eve,which in my experience anyway, isn't always
the case. You don't want tohave a lot of inventory left after the
fifteenth of December because sales of thatreally drop off. Trees will keep going

(32:01):
right up to Christmas Eve. Butthis year was a little different. And
this year we only had two left, two eaves left over out a ton
and a half a brush. Iwas pretty impressed to that. But anyway,
back to the production thing. Sothat's why you've got to be moving.
That's why you gotta work all dayand work all night. You can't,

(32:24):
yeah, can't be fiddle furt andaround Christmas season is short and it's
busy and it's stressful, but it'sprofitable. You can make a good little
extra profit. So anyway, thenyou've got people that are making the big

(32:49):
wreaths. So we're talking twenty fourinch, thirty inch, thirty six inch,
forty eight inch, and you cango all the way up to five
footers, but you start you gottabe careful when you start getting that big
four footers. I don't know.I think a four foot reach is like

(33:12):
one hundred and twenty dollars or something. It's not cheap, but there's a
lot of brush in it. Therings are expensive, but we have we
have a set number of those wehave to do for clients that buy them
every buy them every year. Sothose all have to be made by hand,

(33:37):
and so those guys can be makingthose by hand. Then you got
your decorating crews, and then thekissing ball crews. They've got to have
really particular twelve inch brush that's gotto be uniform, and it's got to
be puffy, and it's gotta bethe kissing ball people will drive you nuts.

(34:00):
You start with a styrofoam ball,it's about four inches in diameter,
and you build by starting at thebottom, filling it in and then working
your way up and you end upwith this beautiful ball made out of balsamo.

(34:21):
Those we actually sell a lot ofthose, well I could. I've
never been able to make enough ofthem to satisfy the retail customers and my
wholesale customers. Because another set ofcustomers that you can get for this kind
of business are flower shops. SoI'm starting to thinking one, two,

(34:45):
three, four, got at leastfour off the top of my head.
Flower shops that work with us,Christmas season is kind of a downtime for
them too, and they like todecorate stuf. But they don't, like
I told you, with the brush. You know, if a flower shot

(35:06):
bought a forty pounds bundle of brushand they're not making a dozen different sized
things, they can't efficiently utilize thatbrush. So they actually buy wreaths and
kissing balls from us, and thenthey buy them undecorated, and then they

(35:31):
decorate them with they're fancy decorating crews, and then they retail them, mark
them up and sell them. Sothey get a lot more money for theirs,
and they're probably prettier. They're moreprofessional decorators than we are. With
their client tele their clients, theircustomers will spend more money, so it

(35:57):
works out great. We're all involved. We have a really good relationship with
a bunch of different florists. Butthis year it was like it was hard
to keep up because we have somany and they would take everything that we
could produce for them. But I'mlike, I gotta sell retail too,
and I've got when November first comes, I've already got a stack of orders

(36:22):
that's an inch thick of orders.Is we have to take all that and
come up with a schedule. Howare we gonna get all of this done?
This is due this day, thisis due this day, this is
due that day, this is due, and people will be like, I
want this by December first, onefifteen pm to pick it up, and

(36:49):
so it really takes it takes alot to keep all of that straight.
So anyway, yeah, beck,I just meander around, you know me,
I don't have no or anything.I'm just talking. But so you
got your brush cutting crew, yougot your production crew, then you got
your decorating crew. They're super importantbecause if you don't have a good decorating

(37:13):
crew, then nothing's gonna sell.So we try to have bows pre made
and made ahead. But then alsowe have a lot of fancy bow fabric
that we buy and they'll be forspecial different size wreaths, and so sometimes

(37:37):
the girls would be like, oh, this would be really nice on this,
and they'll go over and whip upa bow and then get the pine
cones on and get the berries onand get everything. So it looks just
great. Then you can get itpriced, and then you can get it
stacked. And so we start.Actually this year by by Thanksgivin, I

(38:01):
already had REEF customers stopping in andI wasn't expecting that. We didn't even
have the retail displace that up yet, so we ended up taking stuff out
and getting it. We use thewalls on the sides of buildings here on
the headhouses and over around the office, and as they start to sell,

(38:22):
we just go and replenish it andreplenish it. But then you gotta be
careful because the building that you're takingthem out of keep them in cold storage
too. We have a cold buildingwhere they're kept. Well, you don't
want to go in there and graban order that's due tomorrow and mistakenly think
it's for retail and throw it upon the wall and then the people show

(38:45):
up the next Like, I learnedall this stuff the hard ways, like
our first year, and trying tomake things right when you screw up like
that, I mean, you reallygot to bend over backwards if you want
to keep those customers. But thisyear, I feel like the third year
we really had everything dialed in,Like I don't think there was a single

(39:07):
screw up with an order. Everythingwas done on time and it just went
as smooth as clockwork this year.It takes practice, and there's only one
way to learn, and that's bydoing it. I mean, I can
give you advice and you should listento it, but at the end of

(39:30):
the day, just doing it iswhat you have to what you have to
do to learn. It's no differentthan anything else. And so I think

(39:50):
personally, I think it's like ourarea here, like you don't have to
look and see about your area.Our area right now is like I don't
think I could grow the Christmas businesshere anymore because a former employee from here
that left just before I bought theplace, she took probably half the customers

(40:13):
with her, and she does almostthe exact same amount of brush that I
do, which is what leads meto believe she took about half of the
customers. But you know, that'sthat's the way it works. And then
there's another outfit that's making them probablyforty five minutes north east, not very

(40:37):
north, because I'm about as farnorth as you can get. You went
north, you'd be in Canada infifteen minutes or ten minutes. But anyway,
like our area is saturated enough,but there's got to be places where
they're where there where it isn't couldyou could probably pull it off even if

(41:01):
you were to start up in ourneighborhood. I just it would. I
don't. Yeah, I I don'tknow, but I think most places,
uh, there's probably a pretty goodopportunity to get to get into it.

(41:22):
And even if you did it,if you if you could make them for
the flower shops and stuff and noteven decorate them, you could do that.
But it's it's a it's an interestinglittle side business, and yeah,

(41:45):
you just gotta build that. Likeone of the reasons we've picked up a
lot of new customers though the lastyear or so, and it's been primarily
through Facebook ads. And I hateFacebook, I do, but for our

(42:07):
business, the demographics of Facebook arepretty because like if you talk to young
people, like Facebook's known as theold people platform, Like just old farts
are on Facebook, you know,none of the younger generation is. And
but in reality that is my myclient base is what the young people call

(42:34):
old. You know, it's mostlypeople that are forty years old or older
make up a really big percentage ofmy business. And so Facebook advertising ads
have really done, really done goodfor us. And this year I did
my own. I know, lastyear I think I mentioned that I had

(42:58):
somebody doing them for me, andthis year I decided to wait in and
figure it out on my own.But Christmas season is kind of easy because
almost everybody celebrates Christmas, even Pagansand which everybody celebrates Christmas. And it's

(43:21):
not like you don't have to narrowdown your Like all I did for narrowing
down was what's towns and cities Iwanted to target, and then you could
just leave it almost for everybody,because a kid might see it until her
father, a husband might see it, and when the wife starts nagging they
don't have a Christmas tree yet,he's like, oh yeah, I saw

(43:42):
they have them over at that place, or vice versa. That works pretty
good. But like when we're doingFacebook ads for moms, a dial ad
into females, I don't let inemail see see mum ads females that are

(44:06):
interested in gardening, I forget allthat, but and then hit them for
the cities that you want, andit's worked really well for us. Gotta
have good pictures. Pictures are thekey. It's kind of a visual visual

(44:28):
thing. I guess it's not likeunlike any other kind of advertising, but
we still got a pretty good returnon investment doing Facebook ads and for the
Christmas stuff especially, And I cankind of judge because during a peak of

(44:49):
Christmas season, I'm usually running thecash register and running customer service and listening
to people. And people will volunteerwhere they were they heard about your If
you listen, you can you cansoak up all sorts of intel just by
talking to customers. And like thisyear, there were so many new faces

(45:15):
here this year that said, ohI saw you on Facebook and okay,
and so that's another angle to ityou've got to add. But you got
to make sure people know what you'redoing. And then garland. So when

(45:37):
you're cutting brush, you're kind ofthe ugliest long, funky looking stuff on
the top of your bundles that youcouldn't even hide under wreath. That's perfect
garland material. And so we mixhomely looking balsam with white pine and that's

(46:06):
what our garland is. And oneof our wreath making machines is set up
just to do garland. That's Primarilywhy I bought the second machine because I
the last two years I had madeI was making all the garland and it

(46:32):
was a pain because I had towait till the help that was working making
wreaths was done. So it wasalways a late night thing, be out
there all night long, getting tiredand grouchy, and never could make it
when you were fresh and feeling good. And so we got the second machine.

(46:55):
Set that up for garland, soyou could have people making garland and
make reads at the same time.Garland's kind of time consuming. We've the
thing with garland is if you canmake it. Like I said, we've
got other people around the area thatdo wreaths and kissing balls and stuff,

(47:15):
we're still the only people that'll makegarland. So I get all the garland
business, and it's quite a lot, and I turn people away when I
start thinking that I'm not gonna haveenough brush to do it, because there's
only so much garland brush. AndI don't know. I think we got

(47:42):
three dollars or three dollars and fiftycents a foot this year for it.
I can't remember. I think it'sthree dollars. It's there's a limited supply
of what you can use to makeit, so you have to keep track

(48:06):
of your inventory is you're taking ordersas to how many hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of feet of this stuff youcan make now this year, this year
I retired from being the chief Garlandmaker. I don't I was getting one.
I wasn't. I wasn't great atit, but nobody else would do

(48:30):
it, and it really I didit, but it stressed me out.
I thought I was gonna start havingulcers. Halfway through Garland season. This
year, I'd had things screw upand then I'd have to try to get
it fixed. And it was just, you know, it seemed like everything

(48:53):
I did this year with Garland wasjust it wasn't working, and it was
I was making it too thick andI couldn't make it thinner, and I
had all these orders and I wasgetting behind. And my oldest son John
said, well, look, ifyou really don't want to do this,

(49:14):
he said, I'll try it.So he actually is way better than I
am a making it, and he'sfaster. So I handed it over to
him and I went and started doingsomething else that I was more capable of.
And it took a weight off ofmy shoulders and he likes doing it

(49:39):
and he's good at it. Buta funny story. So we were we
had a big order that was duethe next day, and we were a
couple hundred feet of garland and he'sworking on the last twenty five feet of
it and he he says, Dad, he said, I think I'm getting

(50:01):
a shock off of this thing.I'm like, I doubt it very much.
I said, it's probably. It'sprobably you're sitting there holding your hands
in that same position. You've beenthere for how many hours now, and
you've been doing it for days.I said, you're probably getting like carpal

(50:21):
tunnel or something, and it's likea nerve in your wrist that's making it
tingle. You know. Just keepgoing. And he's working a lot.
He's like, now, wait aminute, that ain't no nerve in my
wrist. I said, I.I said, I don't think you could
be getting shocked. He said,you got a you got a voltage meter?

(50:42):
Stick it on there and see.So I went over and got my
multimeter and stuck it on the machine. And I said, all right,
go ahead and run. And hewasn't He wasn't lying it was a vault
and a half. He was gettinga vault and a half off of that
thing. So I tried to Icouldn't figure out what was doing. I

(51:07):
started tearing stuff apart, and oh, like, I know, I don't
see any problem. Like, Ican't figure out why this is doing it.
I'm like, you gotta get thislast twenty five feet done, and
he says, all right, I'lldo the last twenty five feet and then
we're not making any more Garland ortaking any more Garland orders until this thing

(51:30):
is fixed. Which I couldn't blamehim. He was a and he went,
he went, and he finished thejob. He finished the job,
getting electrocuted and all. I tippedmy head to John Terry for sticking with

(51:51):
it. But when he got done, he shut it off and he said,
I'm not going back there until youget it fixed. So I tore
it all down again. I couldn'tfind why it was, why it was
doing it. I called an electricianfriend of mine, and we kind of
swapped favors and do stuff for eachother. Anyway, he stopped by and

(52:14):
looked at it, and he's like, I don't know, he says,
I think the only thing we cando is replace all the wearing because there's
like a there's a foot pedal,and then there's power going to the motor,
and then there's power going to theclutch. That it was a weird
There was lots of lots of wiringand we couldn't find anything. They're like

(52:37):
jumped out at you and said,this is why this thing is shorting out
on the frame somehow. I mean, obviously we knew that it was coming
through the ground because that was theonly way for it to get there because
the ground is grounded onto the frameof the machine. So it's obviously somewhere

(53:00):
in there. There was wires touchingeach other, but they were all coated
coated wire, three wires, insulationaround them all and coiled all over the
place. And like I said,you got the motor, you got the
clutch, you got the there's sowe ended up just I said, well,

(53:22):
go buy what you need to fixit and give me a bill.
So he went and bought a spoolof a spool of wire for it,
and we ended up ripping all thewiring out and replacing all this. He
bought all new switches and we replacedeverything on it and It worked after that

(53:45):
and didn't electrocute anybody, But itwas odd that we the only way we
could figure it out was just toreplace everything, and it worked and then
we got back to making garland.But it's just little things like that that

(54:05):
are always happening to you. Younever know what what's gonna break next.
Oh, and I guess I'm tryingto think of what I've forgotten as I
head down multiple rabbit trails. Yeah, I know what. They probably called

(54:27):
different stuff, different things in differentparts of the country. But like doors
wags, it's like a really nicesymmetrical branch that's almost too good to be
true that nature would produce something likethat. And usually if you get two
of them, one of them alittle smaller than the other, on top
of each other, you'll wire themtogether, put a bow on it,

(54:51):
hang some ornaments and stuff on it, some of them little berries and pine
combs, and you can make thosetwo little pieces of branch and get fifteen
dollars for it. So you're alwayswhen you're going through the brush, you're

(55:13):
like, oh, could you makea swag out of that snip? Throw
it in that pile and it Youcan't make a huge amount of them,
because in nature you just don't getthat beautiful symmetry all the time, but
it does happen often enough that ifyou got an eye for it, you
can always be snipping them out andgetting them. Oh, trying to think

(55:37):
of what else done if you useyour imagination, like I never My mother
in law was out visiting. Shewas out for a week, I think
in the beginning of November, andshe was taking our garbage pile and cutting

(56:00):
balsam sticks out of it and thenhot gluing them together and tying them with
there's rustic looking twine and making starsout of them and then hot blue and
different ornaments and stuff on them.And we sold a ton of them things

(56:22):
this year. I don't know.I think the average price on them might
have been twelve dollars. And thatwas pretty much just well whatever you had
in the decorations, but the restof it was all garbage. It was
gonna get thrown out. Yeah,And that's the other thing. When you're

(56:43):
working in there, you always gotneedles falling. So you sweep up all
the needles at the end of theday and we dry them by the wood
stove and turns out dried balls andneedles are worth a small fortune. And
what we do is take Christmas Evea fabric, and my wife and my

(57:07):
girls sew up these little pouches withhandles on them, and you stuff them
full of dried balsam needles and sewthem shut. And I think the fancy
terminology for it is it's a balsamsachet. I'm exactly sure what a sashet

(57:27):
is, but that's what they sayit is. And we get well,
I think you get five dollars apieceful. I don't know, I see
the sciences over here, but myglasses are off. I'll go, yeah,
five dollars each, and sold quitea few of them. And that's
just you constantly gotta be thinking likewhat find all your waste products? And

(57:52):
you're like, how can I takethis and turn it into something valuable?
Like the sticks? Those sticks aregonna go through a wood chipper, Well,
you make them into a twelve dollarsdecoration needles. You can easily sweep
them suckers up and throw the dustpaninto the woodstove. But no, you

(58:16):
can turn around a little bit offabric. Then there's I don't know,
there's probably a cup, a coupleof them in one of those sash A's
five five dollars a cup for oldneedles. Yeah, so there's all sorts
of different things you can do forChristmas season if you want to make a

(58:39):
business out of it. My warningwould be that when you make a business
out of Christmas, it will suckany joy that you had out of the
Christmas season because by the time Christmascomes, so like Christmas Eve is your
last retail day and you're so happyto be all done and take a deep

(59:04):
breath and start cleaning stuff up.And Christmas Day you really just want to
sleep and not see anybody, andand it is busy. I mean,
you've really got it's such a shortseason. There's such a narrow window,

(59:25):
you know, really, sales wise, it's from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas Eve,
so it's about a thirty day periodof actual sales. But you've got
to start the first of November toget production going so you can have enough
built up by the time, becauseif the customer is coming you don't have

(59:47):
it, they'll go over to yourcompetitor and buy it from them, or
they might go to Low's or somethingand buy some crappy things. I don't
know who in the world supplies themwith their wreaths and garland and stuff,
but wah, it is some uglystuff, and that's what you gotta do.

(01:00:13):
You can't compete well them on price, but what you can compete with
is on quality. And that's thesame thing with my flowers and everything else
that I do here. I can'tcompete with the big boys on price.
What I can compete with is qualityand customer service. So that's doesn't matter

(01:00:40):
if it's selling geraniums or if it'sduring Christmas season. Be happy, tell
people stories and just you know,you've got to you've got to have something
that the other people don't. Butyeah, that's a quick overview. I
don't know how quick it was,but just to give you some ideas on

(01:01:02):
how you might be able to geta little extra business out of this time
of the year. And I'm surethere's stuff you can books you can find
or whatever. I didn't learn anyof it from a book, but you
know, probably not all the peoplethat listen to this, You know,

(01:01:27):
maybe five or six people will actuallysay, huh, I'd really like to
try to do this. And ifyou're one of those five or six people,
just you know, send me anemail at Terry Famileygreenhouse at gmail dot
com and let me know you're interestedand ask me whatever questions you want,
and I'm more than happy to helpyou figure it out. You know,

(01:01:52):
there's lots of different supply places whereyou can buy the decorations and the rings
and all that stuff that you need. Kelco out of Maine is where I
buy most of mine. But Ican give you some pointers on that stuff
and give you pointers on what differentmaterials you need, what kind of wire

(01:02:22):
to use, and all that stuff. I'm more than happy to help other
people get into it, so thatinvitation is always open. Although I might
not I might now want to answerall the questions via email because I'm more

(01:02:44):
of a talker than a typer,and so I might just tell you to
give me a phone call and wecan talk about it on the phone.
But yeah, anyway, we're getalong here. And again I apologize for
the lack of episodes, but Ithink you might have a fairly good idea

(01:03:09):
why I haven't been been doing them. And eh, who knows, maybe
I got a little little break herebefore we start firing up the greenhouses,
so I will probably try to geta few more out. So, yeah,

(01:03:31):
you can always look at our websites, Northcountryfarmer dot com, Backwoods Resistance
dot com. You can email questionsI've been get, I'd got. I
do have a bunch of questions backedup, so I need to do a

(01:03:52):
question and answer show. So doyou have any questions on anything from dairy
cattle to firewood making, syrup,horticulture, entrepreneurship, anything like that.
You can always send me an emailat Terryfamilygreenhouse at gmail dot com. And

(01:04:17):
one of these days I'm going todo a question and answer show again.
We'll try to get your question included. Yeah, So until then, God
bless you guys, and we willsee you again soon. Good night,