ELLSWORTH, Maine — Helen York is an adjunct faculty member at Eastern Maine Community College and makes just $9,000 a year teaching three history classes a semester.
It’s not enough to live on, by even the most creative budgetary accounting. So, to help make ends meet this winter, York has been going fir-tipping on land she and her ex-husband own in Washington County. York will then turn the fragrant tips into Christmas wreaths to sell, just one among many Mainers who have long cobbled together seasonal occupations in order to make a living.
“Even if I just make 100 wreaths, it’ll be enough to make sure I can put gas in the car, keep up with my electrical bill and put some propane in the heaters,” she said. “I think it will bridge the gap. I think it does for a lot of Maine folks.”
Wreath making in Maine is a big business. Large companies such as Worcester Wreaths in Harrington can hire as many as 500 temporary employees each fall to handcraft balsam wreaths and holiday centerpieces. Maine wreath makers sell well over a million balsam wreaths a year, and that means that there is a steady demand for the pounds of fir tips that York and many others harvest from the state’s forests. Washington County is perhaps best-known for its seasonal armies of fir-tippers, who get paid by the pound and who work long, hard hours in late fall to get the job done. In the winter, they may plow snow or cut wood, in the spring they may dig for worms and clams, and in the summer rake blueberries and fish for lobster. But in the late autumn, they harvest balsam fir.
David Whitney, the owner of Whitney Wreath in Whitneyville, now has four production facilities in Maine and Nova Scotia and buys “a substantial amount” of fir tips every year. He began the company as a young man in 1988, but in many ways, the wreath-making idea began to take hold one Thanksgiving 40 years ago when he was a boy of 8.
“My cousin over Thanksgiving wrestled me to the ground. He put his hand over my face, and I smelled what I now know to be balsam tips. I asked him what it was, and he said tips,” Whitney recalled. “All of a sudden, a light came on. I said, ‘You mean I can get paid to break branches?’”
Whitney went home, climbed a spruce tree and filled a sandwich bag with spruce needles, and asked his mother to take him to the local tip buyer, which she did. Much amused by the child’s gumption, the tip buyer told him that his bag of needles wasn’t exactly what she was looking for, and took him into the tip room, where he was overwhelmed by the sights and smells of the piles of branches. Whitney caught on, and started to go fir tipping for real. In high school, he augmented his fir tip money with what he earned selling wreaths out of the back of his truck near the Bangor Mall complex.
“I still think tipping is the most enjoyable labor aspect of the business,” he said. “You’re out in the woods alone, and that’s nice. You’ve got the constant smell of balsam on your hands and clothes and everything.”
He said that Washington County fir tippers, such as the men and women he buys from, don’t do the job just as a hobby or a way to make a little extra income.
“I don’t think that anybody that is tipping is using it for play money. Tipping is serious business. They put in very, very long hours,” Whitney said. “The more hardcore tippers are a group of individuals that make seasonal work a full-time job. People in Washington County for generations have made full-time jobs out of seasonal jobs.”
One reason why Washington County has such an abundance of fir tips and fir tippers is because it is used to be home to many dairy farms. Now, lots of those farms are defunct, with the former pastures taken over with balsam fir.
“I think there were a lot of homesteaders that came in the 1970s and kept the pastures open for 20, 25 years,” York said. “A lot of their kids weren’t interested in that very hard life of subsistence farming, and you have the constant growth of the new baby trees.”
York said that she is just returning to wreath making and fir tipping after a long hiatus, and that the tipping grounds she co-owns are overgrown. Before, she and her now-ex husband had spent a lot of time maintaining their acres so that the trees were trimmed to be dense and conical, with the bottom of the tree “shaped like a drum.”
First, she said, a good tipper has to wait until the frosts come so that the needles are set and will keep their green, fragrant qualities throughout the holiday season.
“We had such a long, warm fall, I just waited,” she said. “We finally got that first really cold snap, and I was dancing around. Yippee!”
Secondly, tippers have to get written permission from the landowner, if they are harvesting on someone else’s land. Those who do not are engaging in illegal activity, and can be charged accordingly.
York said that the lack of snow this season has made for an easier harvest. Traditionally, tippers cut down a small spruce tree and remove all the branches except several at the bottom, making a two and a half foot long stick. Then they start gathering as fast as they can and thread the tips on the stick. A good harvester can fill a 75-pound stick in an hour.
“You do as much as you can as fast as you can,” she said. “It’s kind of like making hay, only you don’t it when the sun shines, you do it when the frost is on the ground.”