HARDY FRUITS FOR SMALL GARDENS. 



125 



also published for Scotland and the northern counties of 

 England. It was thought, again, that fruit-growing in large 

 private gardens hardly required discussion, as by far the greater 

 number of such gardens are so admirably cultivated, and the 

 selection of their fruit stock has been made with such judgment, 

 and as the result of such long experience, that as a body the 

 heads of such establishments require no information or word of 

 advice from us, but rather are themselves the sources of much of 

 that knowledge which our Society endeavours from all sides to 

 collect in order to diffuse and utilise it for the general welfare of 

 the nation. 



The subjects of Railway Rates, Public Markets, and Tenants' 

 Holdings were in turn considered, only to be set aside for the 

 present in favour of the two more practical and more generally 

 interesting ones of (1) " Small Gardens " and (2) " Growing for 

 Market " (for our third day's discussion on " Sorting, Grading f 

 Marketing, &c," is the necessary pendant upon " Growing for 

 Market "), and on these two subjects we know from almost 

 daily experience at the Society's office that further information 

 -will be gladly welcomed by many. 



What, then, do we intend by the term " small gardens," as 

 distinguished from "cottagers' gardens" and "large gardens"? 

 We mean gardens in which from half an acre to an acre and a 

 half is set apart for fruit and vegetable culture. Terms are 

 always relative, and to dwellers in towns even half an acre of 

 such garden will seem " large," whilst to the head of a really 

 large garden half an acre would seem all too small for Strawberries 

 and Raspberries alone. Therefore, simply for the sake of con- 

 venience, we will call gardens under half an acre " tiny gardens," 

 and those which have more than an acre and a half of kitchen- 

 garden " large gardens," and all the intermediate sizes " small 

 gardens." 



Now if fruit is to be grown to any reasonable extent in a 

 small garden at all — if, that is, the gardener is expected to furnish 

 the dinner-table with relatively as much of fruit as he does of 

 vegetables — then rather more than half the space at his disposal 

 should be devoted to it. Owners very often do their gardeners a 

 great injustice from this cause. They (or the cooks, who in 

 England are so fearfully wasteful of vegetables) demand an 

 enormous supply of vegetables for the house— far more than is 



