THE EARLY MARKET 113 



The early market in vegetables and flowers, as it is 

 notoriously in fish, is an uncertain and even perilous 

 quest. A week makes all the difference between the 

 top price and one far below the top, between a due 

 and an inadequate return on capital expenditure 

 and annual labour. To take one example out of 

 many : in the first week of the Jersey early potato 

 crop the price is usually double, sometimes more 

 than double, that of the third week. Moreover, the 

 first week shows a marked tendency to become 

 earlier every year. The first of February may have 

 been an excellent market-day for early asparagus 

 last year, yet hopelessly out-of-date this year. The 

 tiny quantities of the first gathering cannot be 

 marketed to advantage without co-operation between 

 the growers of the same district, and that is one of 

 the reasons why districts become famous as market- 

 gardening centres. The man who grows all of one 

 crop may have chosen the wrong crop for the year. 

 His only rule often is to grow that which was a glut 

 in the market in the year gone by ; but it is obvious 

 that, if all work by the same rule, the same crop will 

 be a drug again. The plan of several crops, aided by 

 co-operative marketing, gives an average certainty 

 as opposed to the speculation of the single venture. 



We cannot wait for the rays of this year's sun, even 

 though we have the magic of glass to catch them out 

 of the wind, and hold them through the night. We 

 dig up the bottled sunshine of many million years 

 ago, and warm our greenhouses so that they give 

 pine-apples in wheat latitudes, and roses at Christmas. 

 Kropotkin says that grapes in Brussels at the be- 

 ginning of summer are not dearer than grapes in 

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