The Bishop’s started Christmas tree farming in 1939. They set up tents on Swamp Creek at the base of Mt. Shasta. “That was really a primitive area” Ken remembers. “Sometimes we had to carry the trees a quarter mile through brush fields and thickets. At night we listened to coyotes and cougars, and bears were always wandering into our camp.”

The Bishops and their crew also had to contend with snow storms and freezing weather. Five years later they decided to buy land of their own, and purchased 5000 acres of wild, forested mountain area near the tiny logging commumity of Tennant, Ca.

“No one had tried to farm silver tips before,” Ken explains, “so our first years we experimented on all types of thinning and pruning methods. We did everything by trial and error. Finally we hit on our own pruning method. It would take 20 years to grow a six foot tree if you planted a seedling: with our method, you produce a tree in 12 years.

The trunks are trimmed of most of their branches, with only a small clump remaining at the top about two feet high, with several whorls of branches lower on the trunk, which Bishop dubbed a hula hoop.

The pruning allows all the nutrients gathered by the extensive root system of a mature tree to go to the few remaining limbs. Shocking or cutting vertical slashes in the trunks reduces vertical growth when necessary and produces a desireable, fully branched, wide based tree.

When the top of the tree is harvested, several of the branches in the hula hoop turn skyward and start new trees. The best potential branch is selected, the others are removed, and the process is repeated on the same stump to grow a new tree every 12 years.

Trees bearing the Ken-Del name tags were sent by the thousands to U.S. Navy outlets in Guam, Alaska, and the Bay Area. In California, buyers for Sears Roebuck stores, Signal Oil, Standard oil, and dozens of other department, chain stores, and independent retailers would find their way to the ranch each pre-Christmas to place orders for trees, wreaths, swags, and boughs.

Ken’s wife Flo, had a fascination for fancy and glittery things. This fascination soon led to a new and thriving business venture for the tree farm…a wreath and door charm division. She added pine cones, ribbon, and a little ingenuity to some of the boughs cut off the trees as waste, and came up with beautiful Christmas decorations for the home. A staff of local women turned out every year to assist her.

Eventually, Noble Fir came on to the market, and became very popular. Sales for Silvertip and White Fir began falling off, and eventually the Tree Farm in Northern California was sold. It has now become a World Class Fly Fishing resort.

Today, Bishop and Mathews continues to thrive as a Christmas Tree Brokerage Firm.