116 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



the suburbs of St. Peter has some sort of greenhouse, 

 big or small. All over the island, especially in the north, 

 wherever you look, you see greenhouses. They rise 

 amid the fields and from behind the trees; they are 

 piled upon one another on the steep crags facing the 

 harbour of St. Peter ; and with them a whole generation 

 of practical gardeners has grown up. Every farmer is 

 more or less of a gardener, and he gives free scope to 

 his inventive powers for devising some cheap type of 

 greenhouses. Some of them have almost no front and 

 back walls the glass roofs coming low down and the 

 two or three feet of glass in front simply reaching the 

 ground; in some houses the lower sheet of glass was 

 simply plunged into a wooden trough standing on the 

 ground and rilled with sand. Many houses have only 

 two or three planks, laid horizontally, instead of the 

 usual stone wall, in the front of the greenhouse. The 

 large houses of one big company are built close to each 

 other, and have no partitions between. As to the ex- 

 tensive cool greenhouses on the Grande Maison estate, 

 which are built by a company and are rented to gardeners 

 for so much the 100 feet, they are simply made of thin 

 deal board and glass. They are on the " lean to " or 

 " one roof " system, and the back wall, ten feet high, 

 and the two side walls are in simple grooved boards, 

 standing upright The whole is supported by uprights 

 inserted into concrete pillars. They are said to cost not 

 more than 5d. the square foot, of glass-covered ground. 

 And yet, even such plain and cheap houses yield ex- 

 cellent results. The potato crop which had been grown 

 in some of them was excellent, as also the green peas.* 

 In Jersey I even saw a row of five houses, the walls of 

 which were made of corrugated iron, for the sake of 

 cheapness. Of course, the owner himself was not over- 

 sanguine about his houses. " They are too cold in 



* Growing peas along the wall seems, however, to be a bad system. 

 It requires too much work in attaching the plants to the wall. 



