BUILDING AN ORCHARD FROM A CITY DESK 
WALTER COLLINS O’KANE 
An Actual Account of One Man Who Has Made a Producing 
Property out of Waste Land While Holding Down a City Job 
S OST city men that I know have some sort of an idea in 
their heads about owning a farm or an orchard. 
A few, possessed of means to get whatever they 
want, have “bought a place” and are somewhere on 
that road of experience that begins by referring with pride to the 
potatoes that cost twenty-five cents apiece and ends in a desire 
to make even a place bought for fun pay its own way. Their 
experience is not particularly interesting to anybody except 
themselves. 
Most of the rest — the ninety and nine — take it out in wishing. 
They have their jobs to hold down, their children to raise and 
educate. Each year they talk it over, but there is never money 
enough on hand to buy a producing property that is big enough 
to provide an income, move upon it, stock it, run it, and hold out 
a reserve fund for lean years. 
The account that follows is the story of the hundredth man, 
of my friend, John Watson, who has built himself a commercial 
orchard, from the ground up, while holding down a desk job 
in a city. It is all fact, without any omissions, corrections 
or additions. 
T HE kind of a job that Watson holds is not essentially dif- 
ferent from that of a lot of men. It neither lends itself to a 
farm as a side-line nor does it particularly stand in the way. His 
duties require his competent attention, and he is not especially 
free to come and go, nor can he be absent for half-days whenever 
he wishes. He has his Sundays, and the usual vacation in 
summer. His salary is reasonably comfortable — the kind that 
goes with a position of responsibility and is just big enough to 
let a man save a few hundred dollars a year, if he is willing to 
forego luxuries of all kinds. 
Watson did not have an early training fitting him to be a 
successful orchardist. But he is no fool. Long ago he began 
studying bulletins and books and reading the periodical press. 
He has turned the force of a good, active brain into the skilful, 
consistent building of a plan. Persistently he has made the 
most of his talents, centred his spare time on this project, pro- 
fited by his mistakes, and kept clear of a slackened enthusiasm 
on the one hand or a reckless tangent on the other. He knows 
more about scientific orcharding to-day than most graduates 
of pomology in our agricultural colleges. 
From the first, and all the time since, he has had the advan- 
tage of the active interest and help of his wife. He says that 
probably he would not have succeeded without her, and I 
presume that there is a good deal of truth in the statement. 
Perhaps it is the major part of the secret. 
T EN years ago Watson bought twenty-six acres of wild land 
a few miles out from the city in which he works. It is an 
eastern city, one of the largest. Its suburbs extend on and on in 
most directions, and there are large towns dotted everywhere 
and other cities not far away. Trolley-lines and steam-lines 
criss-cross the countryside. Nevertheless, as is usually the 
case with our big centres of population, you can find genuine 
country within decent reach if you look for it. 
The land was selected for its location and topography, and 
not for what was growing on it. It is a few steps from a trolley 
and a steam railway station, and close by is a motor thorough- 
fare that carries thousands of automobiles daily and leads 
straight into the heart of the city. 
Most of the acres are hill-slopes, with no great height. The 
soil is not describable in any one term. Some is deep and good; 
some is fair; some is so thin that ledges of rock crop out through 
it. Much of it drains of its own accord, but there are places that 
had to be doctored. In general it is well adapted for orchard 
purposes. 
It looked like nothing worth having the day it was bought. 
Originally it had been covered with forest. Twenty-three 
years earlier this had been cut. The lumberman took all the 
trees of value, except two small groves of young Pine near the 
road. For a generation, then, the tract grew up to bushes, 
scrub Oaks, and gray Birches. It was a thicket, a section of 
waste land, bearing a crop of cordwood if any one cared to 
harvest that commodity — which no one had so far done. You 
would as soon think of starting an orchard in this as you would 
of laying out a tennis court. 
Watson paid a thousand dollars for the twenty-six acres. He 
was buying with his eyes open, and was getting the kind of 
topography and location that he wanted. There were no build- 
ings of any kind on the tract. As farms go, this was not the 
kind of a place to give a second thought to. It couldn’t grow 
a crop of Pigweed without clearing, and clearing is a tedious 
process. But it had the fundamentals of orchard property. 
A PROPOSITION was made to neighbors to help themselves 
to cordwood, provided they would burn the brush. Or- 
dinarily firewood on the stump is considered to possess a stump- 
age value, even though there may be large quantities of it going 
to waste. This is on the principle that anything is worth some- 
thing. The offer of free stumpage, in an accessible location, 
started the process of clearing and began to make a hole in the 
shaggy growth covering the tract. The wood was not all cut in 
one year. It was a gradual process, extending over several seasons. 
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