French Gardening or Intensive Cultivation 205 



have to be secured for the French garden; but as the great bulk of this 

 manure would be available for the improvement of the soil under open- 

 air crops year after year, it cannot be looked upon as a loss after use, 

 but rather as a valuable asset that is never realizeable when gardening 

 purely under glass. 



The disadvantages of gardening under immovable glass structures are 

 fairly obvious. The natural soil, if cultivated, can never be exposed to the 

 sweetening influences of the weather, and if it should happen to be infested 

 with Wireworms, Cockchafer grubs, Eelworms, or fungoid diseases, the 

 expense and trouble of clearing it is sometimes enormous. On the other 

 hand, if stages are erected, and plants are grown in pots, a large extra 

 outlay is necessary, both as regards capital and annual expenditure for 

 staging, pots, soils, manures, and fuel. 



As to labour, it is really no more costly, and no more incessant, than 

 in gardening under glass; but it is a little more so than in ordinary 

 open-air market gardening as practised in the British Islands. It is just 

 as essential, under the French system, to give the plants water, to ventilate 

 the frames and cloches, to shade from the sun, or protect from frost, even 

 as one must attend to these operations at all times when growing Tomatoes, 

 Cucumbers, Melons, Ferns, Zonal Pelargoniums, or other crops under glass 

 during the winter and spring months. 



The reputation of incessant labour and ceaseless toil which has been 

 given to French gardening in Britain by some has been obtained chiefly 

 from those who thought to make a fortune in a miraculously short time 

 without having to work for it, and without having had any experience 

 in plant cultivation or the disposal of produce. With such novices failures 

 have been numerous, but in the hands of expert cultivators, who are also 

 business men, the French system of intensive cultivation deserves careful 

 consideration. 



For example, consider the hot season of 1911. The British market 

 gardener had not a lettuce (cos or cabbage) to sell until about the last 

 week in May, from the open ground, and then 25 per cent of the crop 

 at least was wasted. And in July, with an absence of rain for twenty-four 

 days, and the thermometer frequently showing 85 F. in the shade, there 

 was scarcely a lettuce or a radish to be obtained in any of the big markets. 

 If ever the British market gardener missed his chance of making money 

 out of Lettuces it was in the summer of 1911, and no doubt in other 

 hot summers of previous years. But the French growers who use no 

 glass during the summer can always rely, owing to their system of cultiva- 

 tion, upon beautifully luscious crops of Lettuces, &c., at high prices, while 

 their British brethren are confining their attentions to Dwarf and Kunner 

 Beans which often realize only from Qd. to Is. per bushel. 



Although some assert that there is nothing in the French system, and 

 that it is only an old English one that has been dropped, the fact remains 

 that the French maraicher has tender salads all the year round, and is 

 tilling his pockets with money, while in England the Lettuces, Radishes, 



