Gilpin tree farm offers personal touch to help make Christmas a little brighter

A rural family-owned and operated Christmas tree farm in Gilpin has served the Alle-Kiski Valley for more than 80 years.

Habe’s Nursery co-owners and husband-and-wife team John and Janie Sterosky work overtime during December, making hundreds of homemade pine custom wreaths, grave blankets and kissing balls.

“We make our own everything,” said John Sterosky.

John Sterosky’s grandparents Frank and Stella Habe opened in 1941. He grew up working alongside his parents on the farm and in the early 1980s his mother told him he had to make the bows on the wreaths.

“I hated making bows,” Sterosky said. “My mom told me how to make six different types of bows. Now, I’ve become my mother.”

The couple collects pinecones during the summer for Christmas crafts in December, and a homemade pine wreath is priced at under $30. They sell hundreds of trees grown on the farm annually.

New customer Joanna Potter of Leechburg ventured out with her family to Habe’s this week in search of a Christmas tree.

“The owner went out of his way to make sure we were happy and had everything we needed, including a tree stand,” Potter said. “He takes a genuine interest in his customers.”

Christmas trees are sold in sizes ranging from 6 to 8 feet at $7 per foot.

“Fraser fir is popular right now,” John Sterosky said.

While sales point to a good season for selling live Christmas trees, growers in the region see dark clouds on the horizon — a coming scarcity of trees. There’s also an increasing scarcity of growers, making farms like John and Janie Sterosky harder to find.

Preston Fleming, owner of Fleming Christmas Tree Farm in Derry, said many growers who started out in the 1960s and 1970s are at retirement age and no longer want to do all of the work that is required to have a successful tree farm. Wilkinson, 45, said he is not encouraging his children to be the fourth generations of Wilkinsons to go into the tree farm business.

Greg Van Horn, president of the Indiana County Christmas Tree Growers Association, attributed the anticipated tree shortage on the drought this year and the Rhabdocline needlecast disease that devastated the firs 10 years ago.

Van Horn has seen the association’s membership in the county, which boasted that it was the Christmas Tree Capital, shrink from about 200 growers in the 1960s to about five 60 years later.

Staff writer Joe Napsha contributed.