THE POSSIBILITIES OF AGRICULTURE. 115 



through such glass-roofed kitchen gardens, I could not 

 but admire this recent conquest of man. I saw, for in- 

 stance, three-fourths of an acre heated for the first three 

 months of the year, from which about eight tons of 

 tomatoes and about 200 Ib. of French beans had been 

 taken as a first crop in April, to be followed by two 

 crops more. In these houses one gardener was 

 employed with two assistants, a small amount of coke 

 was consumed, and there was a gas engine for watering 

 purposes, consuming only 135. worth of gas during the 

 quarter. I saw again, in cool greenhouses simple plank 

 and glass shelters pea plants covering the walls, for the 

 length of one quarter of a mile, which already had 

 yielded by the end of April 3200 Ib. of exquisite peas 

 and were yet as full of pods as if not one had been taken 

 off. I saw potatoes dug from the soil in a cool green- 

 house, in April, to the amount of five bushels to the 

 twenty-one feet square. And when chance brought me, 

 in 1896, in company with a local gardener, to a tiny, 

 retired " vinery " of a veteran grower, I could see there, 

 and admire, what a lover of gardening can obtain from so 

 small a space as the two-thirds of an acre. Two small 

 " houses " about forty feet long and twelve feet wide, 

 and a third formerly a pigsty, twenty feet by twelve 

 contained vine trees which many a professional gardener 

 would be happy to have a look at ; especially the whilom 

 pigsty, fitted with " Muscats " ! Some grapes (in June) 

 were already in full beauty, and one fully understands 

 that the owner could get in 1895, from a local dealer, 

 4 for three bunches of grapes (one of them was a 

 " Colmar," 13^ Ib. weight). The tomatoes and straw- 

 berries in the open air, as well as the fruit trees, all on 

 tiny spaces, were equal to the grapes ; and when one is 

 shown on what a space half a ton of strawberries can be 

 gathered under proper culture, it is hardly believable. 



It is especially in Guernsey that the simplification 

 of the greenhouse must be studied Every house in 



