188 HENRY HILL GOODELL 



"I saw three-fourths of an acre, covered with glass and 

 heated for three months in the spring, yielding about eight 

 tons of tomatoes and about two hundred pounds of beans 

 as a first crop in April and May, to be followed by two crops 

 more during the summer and autumn. Here one gardener 

 was employed, with two assistants; a small amount of coke 

 was consumed; and there was a gas engine for watering 

 purposes, consuming one dollar's worth of gas every month. 

 I saw again, in cool greenhouses, pea plants covering the 

 walls for a length of a quarter of a mile, which already 

 had yielded by the end of April thirty-two hundred pounds 

 of exquisite peas, and were yet as full of pods as if not one 

 had been taken away. I saw potatoes dug from the soil in 

 April to the amount of five bushels to the twenty-one feet 

 square, and so on. And yet all that is eclipsed by the 

 immense vineries of Mr. Bashford in Jersey. They cover 

 thirteen acres, and from the outside these huge glass-houses 

 and chimneys look like a factory. But when you enter one 

 of the houses, nine hundred feet long and forty-six feet 

 wide, and your eye scans that world of green embellished 

 by the reddening grapes or tomatoes, you forget the ugli- 

 ness of the outside view. As to the results, I cannot better 

 characterize them than by quoting what Mr. W. Bear, the 

 well-known writer upon English agriculture, wrote after a 

 visit to the same establishment; namely, that the money re- 

 turns from these thirteen acres * greatly exceed those of an 

 ordinary English farm of thirteen hundred acres.' The last 

 year's crops were twenty-five tons of grapes (which are cut 

 from May till October, ranging in price at wholesale from 

 one dollar a pound to eighteen cents), eighty tons of toma- 

 toes, thirty tons of potatoes, six tons of peas, and two tons of 



