Prize Competition, 1885. 
169 
Fifty shillings an acre seems a heavy rent ; but the little farm 
has been well equipped ; both house and buildings being appa- 
rently beyond the need of so small a holding. Bone-manure is 
bought occasionally, and a ton of artificial manure is bought 
annually for swedes and potatoes. The other purchases include 
a pack (240 lbs.) of India meal weekly when cows and pigs are 
both in full profit. The farm looked very unpromising on our 
first visit, and did not look like having a place in the com- 
petition at all; but w^e found it greatly improved in July. 
Potatoes — Champions, Reading Heroes, Magnums — -looked 
very promising: oats (Polands) were a heavy crop. Good 
crops of hay, both on the clover and the old land, had been well 
won. Swedes (Webb's Imperial) and mangolds looked well ; 
and the garden was most productive. 
The third prize in this class is awarded to Mr. Joseph 
Gibbins, who holds 14^ acres of black soil, originally moss, in 
the parish of Culcheth, four miles north of Warrington, the 
property of Mr. W. Hinmers, of Eccles. He pays 50/. a year 
as a tenant-at-will. There is a fairly good house with barn and 
stabling by the roadside, from which you see in the month of 
May the most perfect growth of early cabbages fit for market, 
and in the autumn the most admirable growth of celery. It is, 
in fact, as regards the chief receipts from its cultivation, a 
market garden, not a farm. Mr. Gibbins generally grows 
3 acres of celery, followed by early cabbages, with a further 
crop of potatoes dibbled in their midst, 4 acres also of potatoes 
preceding the celery and other crops. There are also 3 acres 
of oats, 2 acres of clover or rye-grass, and some 2 acres of peas, 
turnips, &c. If any one wants to know how to grow celery and 
early cabbages, this is the place to teach him. The area devoted 
to these crops furnishes the chief revenue of the farm, and is 
perfectly and successfully managed to that end. The rest of 
the land is not so well done. With the immense quantity of 
manure purchased, there is, of course, an enormous growth of 
everything, and weeds as well as cultivated plants abound ; and 
the outlying portions of the little farm were far from clean. 
And this, together with the impression arising out of the terms 
and conditions of the competition, which refer to farming rather 
than to gardening, led to Mr. Gibbins being placed no higher 
on our list. He was not indeed without stock on the farm. 
We saw a very useful cow, six fat pigs, and a good farm mare 
on our first visit. This holding is an example not only of 
successful cultivation but of constant labour. Mr. Gibbins and 
his wife, and a lad and one grown son during the summer 
months, also one man nine months in the year at 14s. a week 
with food, do all the labour, working from dawn till sunset 
