Season peaking for pine straw

A one-time tobacco farmer in eastern North Carolina, Terry Bryant is harvesting a healthier cash crop these days: pine needles.

He and and his crew rake the fallen needles off properties whose owners are glad to get rid of the tree litter. Now in his 27th year as a pine-needle man, Bryant has planted his own groves in Moore County, experimenting with tree spacing for maximum needle production. In all, he produces about 250,000 bales a year that end up decorating office parks and lawns in the Triangle and elsewhere.

Landscaping with pine needles is a Southern tradition that reaches a busy peak in North Carolina at this time each year.

Bales of pine straw are sold by roadside stands. Churches get in on the bonanza to raise money. Home improvement chains truck them in by the trailerload and undercut competitors' prices.

The springtime pine-straw fever is fueled by gardening enthusiasts stirring from hibernation and by commercial landscapers filling ornamental work orders before their efforts turn to mowing lawns all summer.

Family Home & Garden expects to sell 100,000 bales this year at three sites in the Triangle, up from about 65,000 bales five years ago. Family Home & Garden sells longleaf pine as well as a relative, the slash pine, which grows from South Carolina to the Florida Keys. Opinions about quality differ, but the out-of-state pine needles are often cheaper because of greater supply.

Bryant, the president of the N.C. Pine Needle Producers Association, says that landowners in the Sandhills, as the area around Southern Pines is known, get about $1 per bale raked from their property. By the time that bale reaches the local garden supply store, it costs a homeowner between $4 and $5, depending on type of needle, condition and other factors.

"It's like the goose that laid the golden egg -- we get an annual return from the trees," said Mark Megalos, an outreach associate at N.C. State University's College of Natural Resources. "A landowner can expect to recover between $75 and $150 a year per acre of the pine straw, and that's for letting someone else rake it for them."

The longleaf needle has earned a reputation for durability -- one based in science. Because the pines grow in sandy, barren soils, the trees suck nutrients from the needles before shedding them. As a result, the elongated husk dropped from the tree contains little organic material to decompose and can last more than a year, Megalos said.

In keeping with its humble origins, pine straw is also the cheapest mulch. High-end gardeners often prefer to pay about three times more for hardwood blends, said Keith Caruthers, owner of Mulch Masters in Raleigh.

Jeff Taylor, an Apex landscaper, bought five pine-straw bales this week at Mulch Masters to complete a landscaping project. He considers hardwood mulch to be more ornamental, but says pine straw builds up acidity in the soil and is preferable for mulching acid-loving plants such as blueberries, azaleas and camelias.

"It's like a tool in the toolbox," Taylor said. "There's a reason to use it."

The pine-straw industry also is being boosted by state forestry policy that since 1993 has been trying to restock North Carolina's stately longleaf pine tree, whose slender blades can reach 18 inches in length. The total acreage of longleaf pine groves in North Carolina has fallen about 30 percent in about a decade, to less than 200,000 acres today.

Forestry experts believe that the eastern realm of the longleaf pine is shrinking faster than it is being restocked. Under the state's Longleaf Pine Restoration Initiative, the state reimburses growers 60 percent of the cost of restocking.

The causes of North Carolina's longleaf decline are hurricanes, development, livestock grazing, timber harvesting and forest-fire control, which encourages the longleaf pine's hardwood competitors. North Carolina produces less longleaf pine than South Carolina, Georgia or Florida, the sources of some of the pine needles sold here.

As with competition anywhere, pine-needle supply is driving down profits.

Even as North Carolina imports pine needles from more-southern states, some are trying to introduce North Carolina longleaf to Northern gardeners where the standard mulching material is bark chips and pebbles. Quality Pine Needles now has clients in Maryland and Delaware, where it charges about 50 percent more.

"It's the premier pine needle," said Jeanne Williams, a bookkeeper at Quality Pine Needles, a family-owned business in West End, southwest of Raleigh near Pinehurst.

"In this area, the market is pretty flooded. Everybody with a pitchfork and a box can produce pine straw."