138 EVESHAM AND ITS STORY 



Thanks to these various conditions, the expansion of 

 the market-gardening industry at Evesham has been 

 really enormous of late years, the quantities sent iway 

 from that one centre alone being such as few persons, 

 probably, not directly concerned in the business done, 

 have realized. Evesham is, also, in the favoured posi- 

 tion of having more or less output throughout the 

 entire year, instead of depending on a few crops at 

 certain seasons. She produces, in fact, some forty 

 different kinds of vegetables, fruit, and flowers for 

 distribution to places as far remote as Jersey and 

 Guernsey in the South and Belfast and Aberdeen in 

 the North ; the best markets of all, perhaps, being those 

 in South Wales, which has more especially been ' the 

 salvation of Evesham.' 



The business is naturally at the lowest in the months 

 of January and February, yet even then there are 

 sufficient vegetables chiefly savoys and sprouts sent 

 away by train to fill up from 30 to 40 waggons 

 a day. In March cabbages, radishes, and lettuces 

 increase the bulk to from 50 or 60 trucks the day. 

 In April spring cabbages, spring onions, and a certain 

 amount of asparagus will be added to the list, and the 

 total consignments go up to 140 trucks a day. In 

 May large despatches of green gooseberries swell the 

 total to 250 trucks the day, and, though the green 

 gooseberries fall off in June, the larger supplies of 

 asparagus, and, towards the end of the month, the 

 earliest pickings of strawberries, keep up the number 

 of truck-loads to about the same as in May. But this 

 number increases to no fewer than between 300 and 

 400 trucks a day during the months of July, August, 

 and September, when plums, strawberries, currants, 

 apples, pears, green peas, kidney-beans, broad-beans, 

 vegetable-marrows, etc., will all be handled in sub- 



