The Orchard, 1994
Not many know, I use to own a small apple orchard in Gays Mills, Wisconsin, and yes we found that ironic, and to top it off, it wasn’t very far from Ferryville, but I digress.
Like most of my life, there is a story behind this. It must have been 1992/3. I was working at an investment bank and was not very happy. I was living with a partner at the time, Jeremy who I had met in Boston when I lived there then in 1991 I moved to Chicago to see if our relationship had any legs and I was tired of flying to Chicago every month.
We were living on Roscoe Street in Boystown and spent a lot of time buying plants at a garden center not far from our place. It was one of those garden centers that catered to moneyish people and definitely, it’s where the gays would go. If I remember correctly it was an independent establishment and probably owned by a couple of gays. It wasn’t anything like Home Depot’s garden center, not that theirs is bad, it serves its purpose, but this one was more enjoyable to walk around to see the plants from simple spider plants to more exotic ones. The staff was knowledgeable and if nothing else, it could be a place to be seen, again I digress.
Sorry for the detour, but I had to set the stage for how we ended up buying an apple orchard. I think if a person doesn’t pursue their dreams from an early age, then they spend the rest of their life taking detours in the hopes of landing there and I think this was one of those detours.
I always loved growing plants. I remember when I lived with my parents I use to have at least 100 plants all around the house and it was this memory that drew me to our decision. As I said above, I wasn’t very happy working at the investment bank. As much as I liked numbers, for a creative person it left a hole to fulfill. I had been there a few years and got talking to Jeremy about my unhappiness; he’s always been really great at drawing me out at these moments, I’ve had a few others later in life. In talking to him I told him I would love to own a garden center like the one we always went to.
It’s easy to say what maybe you’d like to do, but I am not sure either of us really believed we could do it. Not just because could we run a business like this, but the cost to start was probably prohibited, but when you’re talking about dreams what’s “cost”?
As we talked we thought we could purchase property in Wisconsin or Michigan where it was pretty reasonable. Set up greenhouses there then cart the plants into the city to the garden center, trying to avoid buying plants wholesale from someone else. We started to spend our weekend driving all over looking at properties; I love road trips and at least we were doing something constructive toward my “dream”.
It wasn’t too long before Jeremy, who was close with his brother Jon mentioned this to Jon and Jon brought up “We should move to Oregon and purchase an apple orchard”, Jon lived in Oregon at the time. This one conversation changed the trajectory of “my dream”. We knew moving to Oregon was probably out of scope, but this focused our property search on apple orchards.
You may be asking yourself, “Where are the pictures”, well this was before cellphones as we know them today, I think we may have had a flip phone just for emergencies and I am sure I didn’t think of getting a disposal camera for pics; though there could have had been pics and we just lost them throughout the years of moving and a breakup. I just recently found very few pics of the orchard which you’ll see later on.
Thinking back, I am not sure how we found properties. We had a computer, but the internet wasn’t what it is today. If I remember correctly, we would choose a location and then hit up the local realtor; but I think all of us typically know where the orchards are and that’s where you want to look for property.
With many months spent looking at different properties, we ventured pretty far out, 4.5 hours from Chicago to the little hamlet of Gays Mills. The area had a lot of orchards, some small, some large. We found the local realtor and they had an orchard for sale. A number of years ago, they purchased a large orchard and then started to break it up to sell off; mostly as hunting lots for city folk, but there was one piece that was for sale which had been operated by a brother.
We went and took a look. Now when I say orchard, it was 76 acres with around 25 of those acres with apple trees. There were roughly 5 different types (can’t remember now). No house, running water, or electricity; we did have electricity installed pretty quickly, but as Jeremy and I walked around I knew this was it, at one point I got down on my knees and kissed the ground. It was located up on a hill with great views. This area of Wisconsin had beautiful fall colors and the whole area was set up to grow apples.
This was taken on one of our initial walks around the property. Yes, I had long hair. I had never grown my hair out so decided to do it while I worked at the bank, but once we purchased the orchard, I shaved it off and since then have been cutting my own hair.
The orchard was rough, the owner didn’t take care of it well as you can see by the trees behind us. These were Greenings, pre-curser to Granny Smiths. They grew the size of a softball and made really great pies, but there was no market for them so luckily we only had around 5 trees.
After a few more times looking at the property and doing our due diligence, we negotiated the purchase of the property for $35,000. The realtors would hold the mortgage and as with most farm property, we’d have one yearly payment due after harvest. We were property owners, holy shit it’s real. How do we grow apples to sell? Who would we sell them to? Where was I going to live? (I was the main one to work the property), who would pick the apples during harvest? On and on and on the questions would build up. Jeremy got stressed, and I took things in stride; I miss those days.
I had confidence in my ability in pruning the trees. I read a few books and it seemed easy. We found a cheap motel that would serve as my home for the winter months which was spent pruning; we would need to figure out a longer-term solution, but in the short-term, we needed to purchase a truck. After looking around at a lot of dealers, thinking if we got out of Chicago, the prices would be better, we ended up settling in on a Ford Ranger 4WD.
You may encounter me saying “we” or “I” sometimes because I was mainly responsible for taking care of the orchard on a daily basis. I would live there almost permanently, but hey I had the new truck and the dogs for company. Jeremy would come up on weekends as he still had a job back in Chicago. We both worked very hard to get the orchard back to a respectable-looking piece of property.
There are also very few pictures of the orchard and only one of me; I only found a handful. I can’t believe we didn’t have more, but maybe during our breakup and moves they got lost.
This was our first winter owning the orchard. Jeremy and I walking around the orchard. the day was excessively cold as you can tell by Jeremy wrapping his face with a blanket. this is a good view of how much the trees needed pruning.
The First Year
To say I was ill-prepared for pruning was probably an over-statement. I had bought some hand tools thinking this would be all I needed, I would live at the orchard pretty much full-time, then Jeremy would come up on the weekends to help. It was my first Monday on my own. I dressed in warm clothes. Grabbed the hand saw and other tools I would need. Put them on the sled and out I went. I got through a few trees when I realized this wasn’t going to work, I was exhausted. I would need to go buy a chainsaw. I had never used one before and was a little scared to use it, but in my desperation to get the trees pruned, I hopped in the truck and off I went to buy one.
When I got back to the orchard, I pulled the saw out, filled it with gas and oil, but sat there for a bit looking at it. I could do this I’ve seen my dad and brother do this a million times. Finally, without thinking about it, I started it up and went to town on the trees. I was amazed at how easy it was and before I knew it, there were tree limbs laying on the ground and the trees started to look like trees again and not oversized bushes.
Pruning apple trees isn’t really difficult. Our trees were semi-dwarfs meaning they were smaller than a full-size tree and taller than a dwarf. They were easy to maintain, but still needed a ladder to get to the top. They were roughly 15 years old and hopefully had more years ahead for producing apples. The previous owner didn’t maintain the orchard well and the trees were overgrown with suckers, the thin branch-like growth that typically would grow straight up from the main vertical branch, and our trees had lots of them, some so big they looked like a branch.
I spent the week pruning quite a bit, thinking I needed to get the trees opened up so when they were in bloom the sun could get deep into the depth of the tree to help grow the apples. I was pretty proud of myself for the work I accomplished and thought when Jeremy came up over the weekend he’d be as excited as I was. When he saw all the limbs and suckers on the snow-covered ground he flipped out. “You’re cutting our trees to death, they’ll never grow apples this coming season”. This was pretty typical during that first year. We fought a lot. I had more confidence in my abilities and Jeremy saw the money that was going into it all in the hopes of producing a crop we could sell. But, I kept going regardless.
This was taken in the spring, the trees were in bloom and the bees must have been doing their job of pollinating the buds.
At some point, Jeremy and I went around to the local orchards to introduce ourselves as the new owners. We were met with skepticism, the locals didn’t like “city folk” and they had seen a lot of them come and go trying to do the same thing we were; the difference, I grew up in a small town and those roots were always there and we both realized the only way we could make them look at us differently is to just work hard and do things better than the previous owner.
Spring was coming fast and there were lots to still solve for like bees, do they just find us or what? We had purchased a tractor and spraying (left item in the picture above), but we’d need a mower/mulcher. What would I wear when I sprayed chemicals on the trees? and what would we live in long term, oh yea pickers, I think in the back of my head I would do the picking, oh and bins we needed something to put the apples in.
As I look back on how we solved these questions, I don’t really remember. Wisconsin had great Apple associations with lots of information they sent us. Our orchard sat between two other larger orchards and I suspect they didn’t want our trees to attract bugs and fungus so they would slowly give us tidbits of information, one great piece of advice was hiring “the bug guy”. He would come weekly to look over the orchard and tell us where we needed to spray so we weren’t just blanketing the trees with chemicals. He ended up giving us a wealth of information that helped us, like what chemicals to purchase for what part of the season and I think he even told us where to rent bees.
Our most immediate problem to solve when Spring appeared was how do we get all the prunings that now lay in the tree rows hauled away; there were so many of them. We had to have them gone before the bees came in due to the fact that you don’t really want to do a lot of work in the orchard so you don’t disturb the bees. Our first approach was to just pile them onto the flatbed wagon and haul them to another place on the property to be burnt come winter. We had friends who were willing to come up and help us one weekend so this is what we did.
Once the weekend was over, we realized it was going to take us way too long, we had 25 acres to clear. Luckily by this time, we had met another orchard owner, Jim Flemming. He was closer to our age and he mentioned if we needed anything just ask, so off we went to ask how they removed all the limbs. Come to find out there is an implement that looks somewhat like a fork and you hitch it to the back of the tractor and push the limbs out of the way; so much faster. Then you use the mower to mulch the remaining limbs.
Jeremy gave a sigh of relief when we saw I didn’t cut all the apple buds off during winter pruning.
While the bees were on the property we discovered this was the time to repair the apple bins. You’ve probably seen bins before, they would hold around 20 bushels of apples. We had bought some from the previous owner which were in dire need of repair, but we also decided to purchase new ones; owning a farm there is always something to be done or to be purchased or to be fixed, but I loved it.
There were days I would go out into the orchard and just lay down between the trees and listen to the bees doing their job. Our property was away from the road enough that it was pretty quiet all the time. Jeremy would often get mad at me because there was so much to do and I was the main person doing it, but taking these moments to myself really helped center my being and over time Jeremy understood the value of the quietness of being up there.
It was time to make connections so we could sell our apples. We didn’t have a facility or road access so our only outlet was to sell to the larger orchards nearby. The previous owner told us he would sell to certain growers so we assumed we could just continue that, but I knew I needed to make the personal connection myself. This was the worst part of owning apples to sell, being a salesperson, but at this point in the season, it was about meeting them and hopefully getting a potential commitment.
As I showed up at each orchard, they knew why I was there, but they weren’t going to make it easy for me, they wanted me to make the introductions and to offer up my apples for sale. To be honest, I think the growers hated dealing with the previous owner. He never took care of the trees and his brother the real estate person who bought the larger property; @1,000 acres just to break it up and sell it off to city people for hunting. This made the locals mad and anyone associated with the property was tainted. Now they were being approached by a city person. What I had going for me was I/we spent all our time working on the orchard. We pruned the shit out of the trees. We hired the bug guy to help with spraying. We kept the grass mowed down so it looked nice, we were doing all the right things and it got noticed. I walked away with “We’ll see” and that is all I could hope for.
Spraying
Spraying was the worst chore I had to do and no Jeremy would never do it. If we had an enclosed tractor with AC, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, but we didn’t so what did we do to keep me from being covered with chemicals? We purchased the white hazard suits and tones of gloves. But there was the issue of what would I cover my face with.
The sprayer (white equipment to the left) held 300 gallons of water. You would open the bag of chemicals dump it in the top then fill it with water. Attaching it to the tractor provided it with power.
On the back was a half-circle panel where all the spray jets were located. To make it spray properly, you had to have the tractor at a certain RPM, then you’d engage the sprayer and the chemical came jetting out the back into the trees as you drove between the rows. It would take roughly 3-5 hours to spray the whole orchard, this would include refilling the sprayer several times. The tractor could only go so fast to ensure a good cover of chemicals. If you went too fast the trees wouldn’t get covered enough and you also had to take into consideration the wind.
After looking at a lot of face masks with filters, I purchased one I thought would be ok. It was a full-face mask with filters in the front and you’d slip it over your head. I used it once and due to the heat of the day and the heat of the tractor, I basically melted. We were on a very tight budget until harvest, but there was no way I could spray all summer like this. I ended up finding a helmet that had a little fan inside to circulate air; filters built-in on the back (right).
You’d plug it into the tractor for power so no worrying about batteries. At the time, it was $700, but it was an investment that was worth it and cheaper than a new tractor. Even with this on, spraying during the day was excruciating so I would get up at 3:30 am to avoid the hottest part of the day, and typically the wind was pretty calm.
I have to explain something about spraying. No one liked to do it. It was expensive and contrary to people’s beliefs, we didn’t just spray the shit out of the crops. When we owned the orchard having an organic farm was barely heard of; I think there may only have been one or two in the area, so everyone sprayed their crops for fungus and bugs. In the Spring with the humid weather, you had to spray for fungus to ensure clean apples. We didn’t spray for fungus every week, but it was often if it was humid, but as the days dried up towards summer, fungus spraying ended and this is where the bug guy came into play.
The bug guy would come once a week to the orchard and scout around looking for different types of bugs that infested orchards. He would tell us where to spray to be more focused. All spraying had to stop within so many weeks of harvest, this to me was the day I was looking for!
We had a large field that wasn’t planted and would often walk up there to get a good view of the orchard. This was the backside of the orchard area. You can see the barn in the upper right and the clump of trees there is where the road comes into our property.
Harvest
It’s an amazing thing to see the fruits of your labor happen right in front of you. Owning an orchard really shows you the cycle of life. From pruning the trees, the bees come to pollinate and little by little, you see the green bulbs that eventually will be full-size apples. I look back at my life and can’t think of anything more rewarding to experience. But, farming isn’t easy. You work almost 7 days a week, there is always something you need to solve and in the end, you are at the whim of mother nature.
When to harvest the apples is all based upon the sugar content of the apple. Some apples can be picked sooner than others, but in truth, most apples are picked well before they are truly ready. Apples early to market tend to get less per bushel than mid-harvest when they have higher sugar content.
The other growers eventually come to purchase my apples. Yes, I’d get less money, but they wanted to let their apples sit on the trees a little longer but needed apples to get to market. Now, like I said before we had around five different varieties; including the Greenings, and those were throw-a-way, or give-a-way. Different varieties were valuable at different time during the harvest.
Picking…hmmm…I say this because it’s the most unknown to plan for, for an orchard our size. I started to pick myself and was pretty good at it, but it surely wasn’t going to get the apples off the trees fast enough to meet deadlines for the buyers and once picked you couldn’t let them sit in the bins long. We would move the bin under the big oak trees to keep them out of the direct sun, but ultimately I needed to solve the picker problem. The other orchards relied on migrants that rotated around the country at different times to make money and our area was the last harvest they worked before heading back to Mexico.
We tried hiring school kids, but this didn’t pan out. They were slow and didn’t care about the apples as they emptied the picking bag into the bin; damaged apples get less money. A week or so into harvest I was chatting with another orchard; by now we did become friends with some people. I was chatting with one of them about my issue and they mentioned about their 5 pickers. They were 5 young guys who wanted to make as much money as possible to send back home to their families. One day after their normal day ended I went up to where they were housed and asked them if they wanted to make extra money picking for me after they were done with their first 8 hours. Long story short, they agreed and the next day showed up at my place and picked from 5-8pm.
This is our dog Luxa smelling for turkey poop. The dogs loved the orchard and would often go off wandering, they were like children you always had to keep an eye on them. One day a neighbor came up to the property and say “Do you know your dogs are halfway to town”. I jumped into the truck and sure enough there they were Luxa following Cody and just following some smells.
Looking at this pic, I realized I didn’t address our living situation. After we closed on the property, we decided the fastest way to get a place to live in was to purchase a camper; you can see it center top by the shed. It was a 32-foot trailer and would serve our purposes. We paid $18,000 for it and so the monthly cost was pretty minimal; a lot less than staying in a motel room. It was delivered in early Spring giving us time to get electricity installed, but no water. We had to haul water from the well down the road we had access to. These types of trailers weren’t meant for four-season use, so in the winter it was pretty cold, and no running water. I had to supplement the gas heater with electric heaters just to make it bearable, but we made it through.
I’m always amazed at how some people in this country complain about Mexicans coming up to our country “They’re going to take our jobs”. Well, they are doing the work that entitled white people won’t do. These guys worked 11 hours a day picking apples I’d like to see any white person do it, nope. I was so thankful for having found them. At the end of the season, we had 15,000 bushels of apples, picked off the trees.
With the crops in, it was time to relax and enjoy what we accomplished. The weather was beautiful and we could start to see the leaves turn colors. Pretty soon the cycle would start again, but for now, we got to enjoy the orchard in its quietness. We spent time cleaning up, taking note of what needed to be done for next year and I could finally get back to Chicago for a break.
Beyond
After the success of the first year, Jeremy convinced his brother Jon to potentially come in as a partner. If we wanted to be able to truly make money, we needed a roadside facility so we could sell directly to customers and this would require more investment we just didn’t have. Jon and family flew out and we all spent several days touring the around, looking at houses and talking shop. What came out of the conversation was, to truly make money to support us we needed more apple acreage and access to a roadside.
At the same time our talks about expansion were going on, friends of ours who also had an orchard PJ & Joes were talking about ending their operations and they had roadside access. If we were going to expand, this was our opportunity to grab more orchard land; I don’t remember how much more they had but combined it would have made us a sizable grower. While we started negotiation talks with PJ and Joe, there was a 26 acres parcel that sat directly behind their roadside facility and I didn’t want anyone else to purchase it for development so we quickly purchased it.
We spent the winter months in negotiations, but in the end, they had accumulated too much debt against the property we couldn’t get it free and clear unless someone came up with $60k. One of them thought we would assume their debt along with purchasing the property which made him angry when we said it’s not how it works and we can’t assume their debts.
The right photo above shows our big open fields. We could have rented it out for hay, but Jeremy and I both loved it and would often walk up there during the evening and look back at our property and relish the fact that we actually did this. The road where Luxa our dog is walking was the dividing line between our orchard (right) and someone else’s orchard (left).
In the end, Jon and family didn’t go into business with us. We didn’t find another orchard to purchase to fill in the needed gaps. Timing is everything. Today they own a small farm growing chickens and veggies to sell at farmers’ markets.
Our second year was close to a disaster. A big heatwave blanketed the Midwest area and brought very little rain. 300 people died in Chicago due to heat issues and our apples burned on the trees. When harvest was over we had less than half the crop we had the year before. Being in agriculture you will have up and down years, but it was hard-hitting for our second year.
Jeremy and my relationship started to have problems which led to us running our orchard for a total of three years. We rented the land out for the next two years before we sold all our property and I moved back to Chicago to find work.
I started to do contract accounting work and took a full-time role with a developer who would eventually fire me for being gay. Even though Jeremy and I were no longer a couple, we still lived together until I got on my feet, and with his help, I went back to take classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I eventually moved out on my own and got into the career I have now.
The logo at the top was done by a friend of Jeremy’s named David Csicsko and he used me as the model for this shirt and a couple of other works he did. We had t-shirts made up and I still have a couple left in vacuum bags to help preserve them.
This was shot from the top of our hill. Luxa exploring as she always did.
Though I’ve had a great career over the years in tech and am very thankful for it, at this stage of my life this would have been a great way to retire. The potential of this property could have been endless with the onslaught of specialty businesses.
I now sit in Nevada looking to purchase property and an RV, the circle of life for sure.