112 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



is over five hundred tons, valued at some two hundred thou- 

 sand doUars, and on which the inhal)itants chiefly relied for 

 an income, has now become a side issue, and is entirely 

 eclipsed l)y the immense quantities of potatoes, tomatoes, 

 peas, beans and c>arrots raised under these shelters. It was 

 not my good fortune to visit these glass-houses in the early 

 season; but in Xovember, on the island of Jersey, at Goose 

 Green, in a house some nine hundred feet long by forty-one or 

 two broad, I saw them ploughing down the centre while they 

 gathered tomatoes from the vines on either hand, and picked 

 the pendant bunches of grapes from the trellis work on the 

 sides. No more interest ing description of the vegetable houses 

 has been written than that by Prince Kropotkin, and you 

 will, I am sure, bear with me for a few moments if I quote 

 from his recent article on the " Possibilities of Agriculture." 

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

 heated for three months in the spring, yielding about eight 

 t(ms of tomatoes and about two hundred pounds of beans as 

 a first crop in April and jNIay, to be folk) wed by two crops 

 more during the sunnner 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 

 })urposes, consuming one dollar's Avorth of gas every month. 

 I saw again, in cool greenhouses, pea })lants covering the 

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

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

 of cx(iui.site peas, and were yet as full of pods as if not one 

 had l)een taken away. I saw potatoes dug from the soil in 

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

 s<juare, 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 ugliness 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 returns from 



