182 
The Garden Magazine, May, 1921 
lot were in the ground by the spring of 
the second season. 
Except for a small shipment these 
were the last apple trees that Watson 
bought. He began to raise his own. 
THE ORIGINAL PURCHASE 
Only a man of constructive imagination would have seen in this rocky, 
scraggily-wooded piece of roadside land the promise of an orchard 
A ten by twelve shack was built, big enough to hold a stove, 
a pick and shovel, and some shelves for dishes for the owner and 
his wife on their Sunday visits. 
The neighbors cut cordwood and burned the brush, but na- 
turally they left the stumps. Presently a stump-puller was 
bought, and in course of time two acres were cleared of the stubs 
of Oak and Birch. It seemed too expensive a process and later 
was abandoned. On the rest of the place the stumps were cut 
off as close to the ground as could be managed and left to decay. 
Looking back, Watson is inclined to believe now that clean 
clearing with the stump-puller should have been continued 
through the whole piece because the work of caring for the land 
between the fruit trees would have been facilitated, and the trees 
themselves encouraged to better growth. For several years 
most of the place had to be mowed by hand, which is expensive 
as compared with a horse and a machine. Now the old stubs 
are rotted or hacked out, and the machine can go anywhere. 
As time went on trees were culled for lumber from the two 
small groves that had been left standing when the tract was 
logged. With this lumber the shack was enlarged and a porch 
built on the front of it, and near by a substantial bungalow 
was built. There is still enough material 
on hand for a barn. The groves from which 
these trees were culled have been benefited 
by the process. They are to-day beautiful 
knolls, clothed in whispering Pines and car- 
peted with brown needles. 
After the shack was built and made habit- 
able, Watson and his wife moved a few es- 
sentials to the place and began to live there 
throughout the summer season, Watson 
himself going to the city each morning to his 
job, and returning at night. They have 
done that each summer ever since. 
The winter after he bought the ground 
Watson sent for his first lot of apple trees — 
a hundred of them. According to schedule 
there was to be enough land cleared by the 
next spring to provide a place for them. 
The schedule failed to work out. Neighbors 
had cut some cordwood, but you couldn’t 
reasonably put young fruit stock into the 
kind of a scrambled layout that was so far 
available. The trees were heeled in tem- 
porarily, and the next fall and winter three 
hundred more were ordered. The whole 
I T WAS two or three years after this 
that 1 happened to visit Watson’s 
place, and there saw his scheme in oper- 
ation. We were sitting in the shack. 
Watson took down a tin tobacco box 
from a shelf, opened it, and showed me 
a handful of dried apple seeds. These 
were Tolmans. In another box were 
Macintosh, and in another Spy. 
The plan was something like this. 
In a suitable spot on his place Watson 
prepared ground for growing apple seed- 
lings. In the winter he bought apples to 
eat, and saved the seeds for this private 
fruit-tree nursery. The seeds were 
planted in rows in the fall or early 
spring. By midsummer he had a lot of 
good, thrifty plants. In August he 
budded these seedlings to the varieties 
that he wished. By late fall the young trpes were ready to 
set out. 
I asked him what he gained by this procedure. One thing that 
he derived from it, of course, was the satisfaction of knowing 
his trees from their infancy. He was a sort of god-father to 
them. There is naturally a greater interest and pride in a thing 
that you have raised yourself. Again, there was never any 
question as to a variety coming true to name. Furthermore, 
his trees could be moved to their permanent location with a 
minimum of set-back due to the process of moving. They were 
out of their seed-bed one minute and into their final location 
the next. 
But aside from these advantages he was selecting his bud- 
sticks from mature trees whose performance he had watched. 
For example, there was a big Gravenstein in a neighboring 
orchard that bore heavily and consistently and in general com- 
ported itself as an exceptionally good tree. All of Watson’s 
Gravensteins are reared from scions taken from that tree. 
Last summer I asked him if this plan actually gave appre- 
ciably better results than buying standard stock. His reply 
was that it certainly did not give inferior results, and if there 
THE DREAM COME TRUE 
Energy, coupled with persistence, has wrought a complete transformation and within a short 
eight years the hopeless looking wood lot shown above has been forced into paying productivity 
