Market-garden Farm Competition, 1879. 
843 
Gay's estimate, makes 22/, per acre. Rent, rates, which amount 
to about 2>s. 9d. in the pound, tithes at 9s. per acre, the cost 
of horses, waggons, vans, baskets, and other incidentals, quite 
bring up the annual expenditure to 30/. per acre. From the 
books shown to the Judges, which contain merely entries in the 
shape of lump sums of receipt and expenditure, and from other 
sources of information, it appeared that, taking the average of 
the past four years, one of which — 1878 — was by no means 
favourable for market-gardening, Mr. Gay's business had re- 
turned a handsome profit, equal to 11/. per acre per annum, or 
equal to an interest of something like seventeen per cent, per 
annum upon the capital employed. Taking into consideration 
the very neat and clean state of this market-garden i,the Judges 
considered that Mr. Gay deserved the second prize for his 
perseverance. 
Class II. 
Mr. Lancaster s Market-garden. 
This comprises eighty acres, situated at Stratford, in Essex, 
within four and a half miles of the General Post Office, and is, 
with the exception of a few pieces of land at Rotherhithe and 
Deptford, the nearest market-garden to London. Three acres 
are meadow land and the remainder is closely cropped with 
various vegetables. The land is partly held on lease and partly 
upon a short tenancy, at rents varying from 5/. to G/. per acre. Its 
soil is a dark-coloured loamy clay, heavy and naturally fertile, 
about eight feet in thickness, resting upon a peaty subsoil two 
feet in depth, lying on the gravel, upon the Woolwich Beds, 
or the Oldhaven Beds of the Lower Tertiaries, which crop 
up here and overlie the London Clay, forming a curiously 
irregular patch nearly two miles in length from north to south, 
and hardly a mile in width.* Though heavy and difficult to 
work in wet seasons, this soil soon dries and becomes pulverised 
quickly and absorbs a deal of moisture. In Mr. Lancaster's 
words : — " It is peculiar stuff to work and requires an apprentice- 
ship before you can manage it according to the varying seasons. 
It is most prolific when there is some amount of heat, when we 
say ' things go mad.' I have had Veitch's spring sown cauli- 
flowers measure four feet round, and quite close, and celery one 
foot round, indeed like sturdy trees." 
* " This series seems to stretch across the Thames into Esses, and perhaps the 
inlying patch of the Lower London Tertiaries at Stratford may belong to it, at 
least in part." — ' Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain,' vol. iv. 
part i. p. 258. 
