CHAPTER V 



SMALL FRUITS AND SMALL GARDENS 



All the preceding suggestions relate to orchard practice adapted 

 to small areas, it is true. They will be of little use to the man who 

 has available only the rear of a little slice of land 

 Fruit-g-arden '^^ which his home stands. Yet a part of a fifty-foot 

 "estate," and even a section, of a twenty-foot lot, 

 can sustain fruit trees and plants that will add to the health and the 

 happiness of the home-owner. Back-yard fruit-gardens are entirely 

 worth while, and there ought to be a round million more of them in 

 this fruit-hungry land. 



Can any purchased peach, any shipped-in cluster of grapes, any 

 market-bought strawberries or currants or blackberries ever have the 

 flavor and the freshness of the home-grown product, watched to the 

 moment of ripening, and gloated over with the joy of the grower? 

 Food and flavor aside, the satisfactions, the fun, of growing one or 

 two fruit trees to the production stage, or of hand-raising exen a dozen 

 fruit plants, are not computable in money. 



Let no one, therefore, with even a few scjuare yards of sun-swept 

 ground available, miss the peculiar pleasures of home fruit-growing. 

 Even though the place be rented, it is worth while to plant it, both 

 for personal benefit and for increasing the fruitfulness of the land. 

 In the hearing of the writer, a renter once berated himself for his 

 selfish reluctance to spend a few dollars in fruit-planting the back 

 yard of his rented property. He "saved" the trifle of money, but he 

 lost all the benefit of fruit and pleasure his ten-year tenancy might 

 have given him. A wiser and less selfish man, who ne^•er hoped to 

 own, and who had lived a generation of time in a half-dozen rented 

 homes, said, "I always .stick in a peach tree and a grape-vine, and 

 get some strawberry plants growing, and I've never regretted it." 

 Handling the Theoretically, the narrow spaces, the often obtrusive 

 Back Yard fences, the aspect or the shade, are all against success 



with fruits in tlie smaller home areas. Tractically 

 and actually, astonishing ]>rosperity often occurs to the trees, vines 

 and j)lants which grow in im-ideal surroundings, lining the advantage 

 of loving care. These fruit-bearing items become the real friends of 

 the folks who plant and tend them, and that friendliness is in evidence 

 in the result. 



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