By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Joel Westrate is the rare gardener who grows Christmas trees in his.
Westrate might not seem the first choice to provide the passion to propel 60-year-old Westrate Woods, a wholesale and you-cut Christmas tree operation scattered through Wayne and Volinia townships.
"Everybody's got Christmas tree farms," Joel said. "Garden implies more. You tend your garden with love."
Yet he hated helping his dad, William, who established the family business carried on by his sons upon returning from serving overseas in World War II on 30 acares of land just off Marcellus Highway.
William Westrate was the first soil conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Cass County.
The transition away from Scotch pines helped melt Joel's animosity.
"Scotch pine, you've got to work in the summertime," he said. "If I didn't waste all my summers shearing Scotch pine, I'd be a good golfer. It was tough growing up. Mark and Bruce used to go work out in the field in the day. While most 12- or 13-year-olds would wait anxiously for their fathers to come home, I dreaded it because that meant he'd get home about 4 and I had to spend the rest of the evening with him at the farm and work with him until you couldn't see anymore. From 4 to 9, I was his."
"The difference between a pine and a spruce and a fir," Mark says, "is a pine only has buds at the end of the branch. A normal Scotch pine has four buds, which means it will have four branches the next year. When you cut it during the growing season, you injure it. It overreacts to the injury, so where you may have had four buds naturally, you'll have 10 to 15. That's what thickens the tree. But because you have to do it during growing season, you're limited to a shorter window" during warmer months of June and July.
"These, you can do it in the middle of the winter if you want," Mark added. "A spruce or a fir has only one bud at the end, but it has buds all the way along the branch."
"Shearing is the one job we don't hire out," Joel said. "I do it, Mark's son does it or my brother Bruce do it all ourselves."
Bruce is a professor in Texas. His son Nick graduated from the Juilliard School of Drama and is making a name for himself as an actor.
Nick recently landed the lead in an Off-Broadway play opening in January as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
"Terre Haute" takes its name from the Indiana city where McVeigh was incarcerated before his execution.
The other character is author Gore Vidal, with whom McVeigh corresponded. Nick debuted on Broadway a year ago last May in a play with Kevin Spacey and enjoyed goading his conservative dad that he was having dinner with Spacey, Sean Penn and Bill Clinton.
Bruce's daughter, Molly, is in Washington, D.C., where she arranges interviews for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
As a 17-year-old actress in 1998, she portrayed poet Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst" at Beckwith Theatre.
William Westrate grew a variety of trees, including red pine, Ausrian pine, blue spruce, balsam, Scotch pine and even the state tree – white pine.
"We haven't put a Scotch pine in the ground for over 20 years," said Mark Westrate, Dowagiac's city attorney.
Trees grow about a foot a year, so take nine to 10 years to produce.
To harvest them, the Westrates use a mower equipped with a saw blade.
Concolor firs, also known as white firs, have sap with a citrus smell.
"If you're out with them in the summertime you feel like you're in the middle of an orange grove," Mark said. "And you don't need gloves to handle them because the needles are rubbery and soft."
Acreage off Glenwood and Griffis roads specialize in Frasier and Concolor Firs.
Their tour Wednesday afternoon started on the original "north half" off Gage Street, followed by the "south half" a few years later.
Mark says there's 65 acres on this farm, one of four.
"We've changed our planting style," Joel said. "We plant them farther apart – eight feet as opposed to 5 1/2 or six feet – to give them more room, so they don't grow quite as much into each other. Better weed control and easier mowing."
The previous spacing allowed for about 1,100 trees per acre.
William Westrate died Aug. 13, 1997. His wife, Joan, also a WW II veteran, was born in Grand Rapids July 5, 1919, and came to Cassopolis from Paw Paw. They married in Grand Rapids on Oct. 3, 1947. She died April 29, 1999.
She was a registered nurse at Lee Memorial Hospital in Dowagiac and at the former Pawating Hospital in Niles. Being a "city girl," she always insisted their family live in Cassopolis, but they bought a crop farm in Penn Township on a land contract in 1948, borrowing the down payment from Roses, who operated a used furniture store in downtown Dowagiac.
"This is 'Christmas tree garden No. 1," Joel says. "Christmas tree garden No. 2" is adjacent to Butler Tree Farm.
A recent retail addition to the ever-expanding evergreen empire is Trinity Gardens Landscape Co. and Garden Center at 25250 C.R. 4, Elkhart, Ind. (www.TrinityGardens.com or 574-264-9989), featuring Christmas trees two to 20 feet fresh cut daily and fresh wreaths for under $5.
Hours are Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m; and Sunday, noon-5 p.m.
Sandy Wagner from Upstream Waters Landscaping on Dutch Settlement Road cuts boughs for wreaths.
Four billboards – two in Cass and two in Elkhart – promote Trinity with the slogan "they're real … and they're spectacular," which on Seinfeld referred to "Desperate Housewife" Teri Hatcher's anatomy – not Christmas trees.
"We're trying to go for trees that are top shelf," Joel explains. "We're trying to do only the best at a reasonable cost. We used to plant in the spring," but because of the sandy, dry topography of late, "we do a little bit better when we plant in the fall."
Besides growing Christmas trees, their brother Bill's ingenuity has been applied to patenting U-Balls, basketlike devices which contain trees with burlapped bottoms and prevent them from tipping over.
Bill, the oldest of five Westrate sons, is a former Daily News journalist and Brookfield Zoo reptile keeper. The youngest, Eric, lives in Virginia.
Bill's son Joseph operates a popular restaurant in Santiago, Chile, named for his mother, Zully.
U-Balls "allow us to dig our live trees from sandy sites without messing up the balls. We can take our live trees to market in a manner which won't harm the ball," Joel said. "You pick up this device by side lifting tabs and you never actually touch the root ball again. It has retail applications for marketing as well as handling ease."
Joel lives in the Grand Rapids area (although his two-story garden cabin should be completed this spring), where he has longtime customers who hire him to set up their trees.
"You get a chance to visit with the family and the kids once a year. It's just a nice way to make a buck. We drill holes in the bottom of the trunk with a machine with a tapered drill bit. The stand has a pin in it, so the tree sits right in it. There are no screws, so the tree is always straight. You're taking away the hassle that drives a lot of people to artificial trees."
Joel worked for Spartan Stores in Grand Rapids for about 20 years until he had "a mid-life crisis and quit. My nephew, Mark's son, started moving trees for us. Once I came down, we had to start balling and burlapping the trees so, instead of taking one tree at a time, you can take an order for 20 or so at once. That's when we discovered that digging in the sand was a problem and the U-Ball came about.
"If you plant a tree that has a clay ball in sandy soil, you can hardly keep it hydrated because when it does rain, the water hits that clay ball and rolls off into the sand. We've sold the U-Ball, which allows you to match the tree – the soil type of the ball – with the surrounding site. We've sold U-Balls in probably eight states. There are two trees in U-Balls in front of the Lowe Foundation on Decatur Road."
Westrates are also developing a tree cover and a U-Ball made of lighter composite plastic instead of steel.
They send trees to Chicago, but they used to ship them as far as Texas and Florida. "We just delivered a big outdoor Christmas tree yesterday for Notre Dame. That was kind of exciting," Joel noted.
The older Scotch pine lots make good deer and turkey habitat.
"I see a lot of wildlife out here I never saw as a kid," Joel said. "Once we get this all cleaned up, this will be Christmas tree garden No. 3."
One field he hoped to have "pristine" by now has been slowed by uncooperative weather.
Joel pulls up to the two heated cabin campground, Sunset Slopes Park, that Sam Butler of nearby Butler Tree Farm helped build and oversees for them.
"We've got our fingers in a few different things now," says Joel, who divides his time between mornings in the woods and afternoons at Trinity. "I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing.
"One nice thing about doing Christmas trees is it keeps you busy all the way through December, so you don't have time to let the weather get you down. By the time you know it, you're through December and only have January and February left. It seems to shorten winter."