MARKET GARDENS. 373 



LX. MARKET GARDENS. 



My remarks above have chiefly referred to the supply of 

 vegetables in London. There are large markets in all the prin 

 cipal towns ; but it is difficult to conceive the amount required 

 for the supply of this mammoth city, with its two million hungry 

 mouths, not one of whom, scarcely, in any direct form, produces 

 a single mouthful for himself. 



The extent of the vegetable gardens in the neighborhood of 

 this great city is enormous, and the multiplied facilities of con 

 veyance make even remote places, now, in many articles the 

 suppliers of London. Fifty years ago, it was calculated that 

 there, were two thousand acres cultivated by the spade, and 

 eight thousand by the spade and plough conjointly. The extent 

 of cultivation must, of course, be at present much greater. It is 

 said of one individual that he had eighty acres in asparagus, and 

 of another that he had sixty, and that the forming of the beds 

 was estimated at 100 per acre. This undoubtedly was under 

 the old system of growing asparagus, when the soil was to be 

 taken out to a depth of some feet, and a bed of stones placed at 

 the bottom, and other expensive arrangements. Now, asparagus 

 is grown almost as easily as carrots or celery, it only requiring 

 to be first grown in a nursery or seed bed, and then transplanted 

 in the bottom of deep furrows or trenches, made two feet dis 

 tance from each other, well bedded with manure, and the bed 

 itself kept constantly clean, and annually covered with a loading 

 of manure in the autumn, which must be dug in with a fork in 

 the spring. This, in three years from the seed, gives as good 

 and abundant a plant as under the old method of trenching and 

 bottoming with stones, and laying a foot of manure on the stones. 



The amount of vegetables sent by some individual salesmen 

 is enormous. The principal market-days are three times in a 

 week, but Saturday is the principal day ; and it is confidently 

 stated though in relating it I fear that some persons may think 

 the credulity of their too-confiding countryman has been prac 

 tised upon that a single grower has been known to send, in one 

 day, more than nineteen hundred bushels of peas in the pod, and 

 seven or eight loads of cabbages, averaging eighteen hundred 

 cabbages each ; and at another season, from the same farm, four- 

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