- JG
- This morning, at Top Banana in Ballard.
This morning when I passed the Ballard indie produce stand Top Banana, my nose for hard-hitting news set to smelling: What is the fate of all those unsold Christmas trees?
Erik Balderas has worked at Top Banana for 11 years. Every year he manages the tree lot. He told me there are about 75 trees left on the lot this morning. A handful will go to persons of the Russian Orthodox persuasion, who don’t celebrate Christmas until January 7. “I give ’em a screaming deal,” he says. Anybody can get this deal. You want a tree? “Depends on the person but, you know—20 bucks, any tree you want.”
This is what it’s like shopping for a tree at Top Banana. It’s not expensive and they will negotiate, because Top Banana—year-round—is a classic small business, where the people get to know you, make recommendations, teach you how to become sensitive to a melon; that sort of thing. I had a friend this year who told me she was getting her tree at Fred Meyer because she was on a budget. After we’d both bought trees, mine at Top Banana, I asked her how much hers had cost. It turned out we’d paid the same. You can get a great big tree at Top Banana for forty bucks. The cheapest are $10 to $20.
This year, 40 of the leftover trees in Top Banana’s lot this morning will go to a lady who walked in a few days ago, handed over a business card, and said she needed 40 trees for an event, Balderas said.
The rest will either be woodchipped and returned to farms or composted. The trees at Top Banana come from Shelton, which Balderas said is still “considered the Christmas tree capital of the world,” even though you get the tax break if you buy from Oregon or Canada instead.
Every year, Top Banana sells about 3,000 trees, Balderas said, and because the profit margin on trees is better than, say, the 19 cents bananas bring in, the year-round business depends on the holiday lot.
Still, the lot could have been empty this morning—it just would have meant disappointed customers, Balderas said.
“We could have sold out on Sunday or Saturday, really, but our boss is somebody who knows there are a lot of people who run late, so he brought in like 80 more trees on Sunday morning,” he said.
Whenever you go to Top Banana, you should ask what’s good, because they will steer you not only toward but away from things. For now, trust “pears, apples, grapes, citrus is coming up—grapefruit and the mandarins, blood oranges, meyer lemons—and root veggies like parsnips, fennel,” Balderas said.
Weird item of the moment: guava.
If you would like to consider a Seattle art installation that some people used to call “jail for trees” as you ponder the prospect of a Christmas tree lot on the Morning After, here is something I wrote about Robert Irwin’s Nine Spaces, Nine Trees, which is now on campus at the University of Washington.
