838 Report upon the Market- Garden and 
and made a most important addition to his receipts for the year. 
The land is hired on a lease of fourteen years, which gives an 
enterprising tenant spirit to garden well ; though it was ascer- 
tained that by no means all market-gardeners are protected by 
leases, in spite of their extremely large outlay in the shape of 
manures and cultivation. 
The soil of this market-garden is a darkish clay upon the 
London Clay formation, from three to four feet in thickness, 
resting upon a thick bed of gravel. It is not naturally very 
fertile, but is grateful and works well. 
Four horses of a most serviceable stamp for land and road 
work, quick movers, yet large-framed, which cost from seventy 
to eighty guineas, and a pony, are fully employed upon the forty- 
four acres. This may appear to be an excessive strength of 
horses ; but the greater part of the land is ploughed twice in 
the year, and the whole of the produce is taken by horses to the 
Borough and Spitalfields Markets, respectively distant eight and 
seven-and-a-half miles from Barking. Manure from the stables 
and cowsheds is brought back from London in the waggons and 
vans that have taken up the vegetables to the markets, as much 
as six waggon loads per week having been brought on the farm 
during the six months preceding the Judges' visit. Six shillings 
per ton is the cost of this manure, and not less than thirty tons 
are put on an acre, with but few exceptions, for every crop. 
Besides London dung, horse-hoof parings at from three to four 
tons per acre, horn shavings at eight to ten cwts. per acre, bone 
dust at ten cwts. per acre, guano at five cwts. per acre, nitrate of 
soda at from two to four cwts. per acre, are used. Nitrate of 
soda is found to answer remarkably well for cabbages and onions 
upon this land, being applied in two dressings of from one-and- 
a-half to two cwts. per acre. The average annual cost of London 
manure upon Mr. Gay's land is 270/., or 11. per acre ; and the 
average annual cost of artificial or other manures is 130/. or 2>l. 
per acre, making a total expenditure of 10/. per acre per annum 
for manure alone. It cost Mr. Gay 595/. last year for labour, 
or, 13/. 10s. bd. per acre ; and it will cost him more this ,year 
on account of the rampant weeds. 
Mr. Gay was one of the lucky market-gardeners who had a 
good quantity of "greenstuff" in the early spring of this year. 
Much of this either had been cut up entirely, or much retarded 
in growth by the long-continued frosts ; and the price of all 
green vegetables was consequently unusually high in April. On 
the occasion of their first visit the Judges found Mr. Gay engaged 
in pulling a capital crop of well-grown coleworts, which were 
making figures evidently most satisfactory to him. According 
