996 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



most in vogue in the market garden were those of the more bulky kind — 

 that is to say, of the kind more nearly allied to dung— namely, raw fish, 

 furriers' waste, woollen rags, shoddy, and the like. In fact, for the most 

 part, the same kind of bulky manures as the hop farmer has long 

 delighted in. Most of these manures are chiefly nitrogenous, and the 

 market gardener, like the hop farmer, is too often not alive to the fact 

 that he is neglecting to supply the phosphates necessary to balance the 

 nitrogen in them and to enable them to do their full work. 



No doubt the better read and more thoughtful of our market gardeners 

 have learned sufficient from ordinary farm practice to extend their system 

 of manuring to the use of more concentrated fertilisers, such as Peruvian 

 guano, bone dust, dissolved bones, superphosphate, fish guano, nitrate of 

 soda, and sulphate of ammonia. But it is probably not too much to say 

 that they are still in small proportion, considered relatively to their many 

 brethren who neglect the aid offered by concentrated and easily portable 

 fertilisers, and who question the virtue of any manure that does hot, 

 either by its bulk or by its smell, present some resemblance to dung. 



Market gardeners who rely upon purchased dung from towns are 

 aware that it consists largely of soiled straw not half saturated with 

 liquid excreta ; and of solid horse manure from the streets, which is 

 little more than undigested fodder ; and that this town dung is a very 

 different thing from the cake-fed dung of the farmyard Some of them 

 have probably heard that the weight of purchased dung is sometimes 

 made up by the use of the hose or of the pump, and some who have taken 

 the trouble to use a weighbridge may have discovered that the dealer in 

 dung is apt to make mistakes either in his weights or in his invoices. 



To partly make up for all these deficiencies, the common remedy is to 

 apply very much larger quantities of purchased dung per acre than would 

 be used in the case of ordinary farming with ordinary farmyard manure. 



The cost of town dung on rail in London is usually about 3s. to 

 3s. Gd. per ton during the time of chief demand. It is cheaper in 

 summer when it is in less demand, but it then has to be heaped and 

 stored and deteriorates in value before it is used, which discounts the 

 advantage of cheapness to a considerable extent. The cost of carriage 

 varies from about 2s. per ton for twenty-five miles or under, up to 3s. Gd. 

 per ton for fifty miles. That is to say, the dung costs, during the busy 

 time, delivered in trucks at a local station, from 5s. to 7s. per ton. If 

 we assume an average distance of two miles from the station to the farm, 

 cartage at 9d. per mile brings up the cost, on a farm from twenty to 

 fifty miles distant from London, to from 6s. Gd. to 8s. Gd. per ton. At 

 Hadlow it costs us, on the farm, 8s. per ton, and it is probably only on 

 very favourably situated farms that purchased dung costs much less than 

 7s. per ton. 



Our market gardeners seldom use a dressing of less than 25 tons 

 of dung per acre, costing, in round numbers, £10 per acre — a quantity 

 quite insufficient to grow maximum crops ; and they often use as much 

 as 50 tons, costing 120, per acre, in one dressing. 



It had long been the conviction of one of us that such heavy dressings 

 in ust be economically wasteful, and that market gardeners would do far 

 better for themselves in using smaller dressings of purchased dung and 



