Smaller trees were about broken in half. With another tree that was about eight feet tall, “they took out the top three foot of it, I guess,” said Nieman, who noticed the damage Sunday morning.
“It’s pretty brutal,” he said. “When I saw it, I knew right away a person had done it,” he said. “I could tell it wasn’t deer, wind or anything like that.”
“It’s like 10 or 12 that they actually damaged,” Nieman said. “They tried to damage other ones as well, but I was able to fix those.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “It’s not going to hurt our business or anything like that, really. It’s more about how someone would have the nerve to do that, you know what I mean? It’s just not right.”
The nursery is growing about 70,000 Christmas trees, “from babies up to 20-footers,” he said.
At first, he noticed a couple of damaged trees on Sunday morning, “and throughout the day I kept finding more and more.”
He eventually found a pattern of where the vandal, who he guesses was an unhappy customer seeking revenge, circled through the field.
The damaged trees will continue to live, but don’t have futures as Christmas trees themselves, which are still in the ground, and growing. Instead, “As they get bigger, we’ll use them to make wreaths out of them, and stuff like that. We make all of our wreaths ourselves, so we need greens, branches for that.”
The nursery reported the incident in case anybody knows something, he said. People with information about the damage can call Ross Township police at 513-863-2337.
Ross police were not immediately available to comment.
This has been a record year for the nursery, which sells about 4,000 of the trees each year, he said. That’s because “more people want real trees the past few years than years past,” Nieman said. “And there’s not as many other Christmas-tree farms around, and there’s not a lot of corner lots that are selling trees, because the wholesalers don’t have as many trees for the demand.”
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