362 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



VEGETABLES FOR MARKET. 

 By W. G. Lob.toit, F.R.H.S. 



I am not responsible for the subject. It was chosen for me ; but for the 

 treatment of the subject I am responsible, and as I am neither a botanist 

 nor a scientist, nor able to weave golden fancies about common things, 

 but a plain market-gardener, who is compelled, by the stern necessity of 

 making a living amid the fierce competition of to-day, to look upon the 

 things he grows as so many articles to turn into money, and is robbed 

 thereby of much of the pleasure there is in growing for the joy of 

 watching Nature's development, my readers must not be disappointed 

 with plain treatment. 



It will not be questioned that the supply of fresh vegetable food is an 

 important factor in maintaining healthy life in large cities. Yet scarcely 

 anyone would be found to deny that the methods for distributing the 

 . t _ i tables among our population are ludicrously inefficient ; failing most 

 where cheap and rapid distribution is most needed, viz. when the supply 

 is abundant and cheap ; interposing between the consumer and the 

 grower unnecessary changing of hands, and sometimes re-carriage over the 

 same road. 



London, in area and in population, has outgrown the system that 

 served to dispose of the limited supplies that came in on the carts and 

 barrows of the market-gardeners who tilled the fertile lands of Stepney, 

 Bermondsey, Vauxhall, Chelsea, Fulham, and Battersea, and were 

 sufficient to meet the needs of the comparatively small population when 

 the Georges reigned. It is hardly possible to-day to conceive of the state 

 of things when Vauxhall Bridge Road was bordered by market-gardens, 

 when Stamford Street was a walk through flower-gardens (yet the writer 

 has talked with people who remember both), and when there was no over- 

 sea supply. Now there is scarcely a market-garden left within ten miles 

 of Covent Garden, and very soon the radius will be twenty miles, and 

 cultivators as far south as the Antipodes, as far west as San Francisco, and 

 as Ear cast as Japan, are looking to England, and above all to London, as 

 the chief market for their produce. Yet the market area of London is 

 appreciably enlarged : Farringdon Market that used to be has gone. 

 There are fche unchartered markets at the railway termini of King's Cross, 

 Bt Panoras, and Paddington ; there is the G.E.R. market at Stratford, 

 and the municipal market at Brentford — the only one of its kind in all 

 London — and there have been one or two additions to the area of Covent 

 Garden Market. Greengrocers from the outlying suburbs, where now 

 the greatest residential population is, drive their vans in to take back pro- 

 duce which a few hours previously was carried along the same roads, 

 I*, i haps passing their very doors. It is still the greengrocer's policy to 

 ..•11 a limited quantity at a high profit: would not the draper do the 

 same if he had to fetch his goods in his own conveyance from a market 

 live or six miles away, and be up in the small hours of the morning to do 



