• By CHRIS ALDRIDGE
• Kentucky Agricultural News

Dale Barker thinks he may have found “a silver lining” to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed the way a Kentucky Proud Christmas tree farm is selling its evergreens.

This year, on its 25th anniversary, Barker’s Christmas Tree Farm in Lexington unveiled an online reservation system for customers to come out and either cut their own Canaan fir or white pine, or pick out a live Norway spruce with its root ball wrapped in burlap.

“We’ve been first-come, first-serve for 19 years,” owner Dale Barker said. “But this year, we decided we had to spread people out (for social distancing).” In recent years, Barker said traffic outside the tree farm at 1500 Deer Haven Lane, a dead end road, had become a safety concern.

“Our biggest weekend is right after Thanksgiving, when everybody seems to come out at the same time,” he said. “Our problem in the past was we’d have 150 people in here at times. We had people sitting on our road for an hour waiting to get in.”

“It (requiring reservations) is something we had in the back of our head anyway. When COVID came along, we knew we had to do something to eliminate the crowds.” While reservations eliminated the line of people waiting to get into the tree farm, Barker said that isn’t the only silver lining.

“It solves another problem: the older I get, my health gets older too,” he said. “We can only do so much, so it was a good year to make a change.”

In the past, the tree farm opened on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and stayed open until its supply of trees was exhausted. This year, with just over 900 trees available, the farm was booked solid weeks in advance with 40 customers per hour on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 27-28. They signed up on the farm’s website, www.barkerschristmastreefarm.com.

“It went really well,” Barker said, noting the new reservation system was publicized on TV and radio, and on the farm’s Facebook page and website. “Everybody was very receptive about it. Most people were thankful they could get in because, in the past, many couldn’t because of the long lines.”

Some longtime customers, however, didn’t get the word.

“I had some of our loyal customers call and say they just heard that they had to have reservations this year,” Barker said. “We hate to lose them, but everthing’s changed this year. If you go anywhere or do anything, you’ve gotta call ahead.

“People don’t realize that trees are not an endless commodity. We can’t just restock the shelves.”

The family-owned, choose-and-cut tree farm provides a saw for customers to cut down the tree they select and a wagon to transport it to their car.

The popularity of certain types of Christmas trees has changed in the past quarter-century. Today, Canaan firs are the farm’s most popular tree variety.

“When I first planted in 1995, Scotch pines were the most popular tree,” said Barker, who no longer plants the variety because of its susceptibility to disease.

After planting the tree farm’s first crop, Barker nurtured the young trees through seven years of heavy rain, wind, hail, and drought before they were mature enough to sell in 2002.

“I’m like a tobacco farmer,” he said. “I work all year round for about two days worth of selling.”