IV

The market-gardeners, we say, are forced to become machines and to renounce all joys of lift to obtain their marvellous crops. But these hard grinders have rendered a great service to humanity in teaching us that the soil can be “made.” They make it with old hotbeds of manure, which have already served to give the necessary warmth to young plants and to early fruit; and they make it in such great quantity that they are compelled to sell it in part, otherwise it would raise the level of their gardens by one inch every year. They do it so well (so Barral teaches us, in his “Dictionary of Agriculture,” in an article on market-gardeners) that in recent contracts, the market-gardener stipulates that he will carry away his soil with him when he leaves the bit of ground he is cultivating. Loam carried away on carts, with furniture and glass frames — that is the answer of practical cultivators to the learned treatises of a Ricardo, who represented rent as a means of equalizing the natural advantages of the soil. “The soil is worth what man is worth,” that is the gardeners’ motto.

And yet the market-gardeners of Paris and Rouen labour three times as hard to obtain the same results as their fellow-workers in Guernsey or in England. Applying industry to agriculture these last make their climate in addition to their soil, by means of the greenhouse.

Fifty years ago the greenhouse was the luxury of the rich. It was kept to grow exotic plants for pleasure. But nowadays its use begins to be generalized. A tremendous industry has grown up lately in Guernsey and Jersey, where hundreds of acres are already covered with glass — to say nothing of the countless small greenhouses kept in every little farm garden. Acres and acres of greenhouses have lately been built also at Worthing, in the suburbs of London, and in several other parts of England and Scotland.

They are built of all qualities, beginning with those which have granite walls, down to those which represent mere shelters made in planks and glass frames, which cost, even now, with all the tribute paid to capitalists and middlemen, less than 3s. 6d. per square yard under glass. Most of them are heated for at least three or four months every year; but even the cool greenhouses, which are not heated at all, give excellent results — of course, not for growing grapes and tropical plants, but for potatoes, carrots, peas, tomatoes, and so on.

In this way man emancipates himself from climate, and at the same time he avoids also the heavy work with the hot-beds, and he saves both in buying much less manure and in work. Three men to the acre, each of them working less than sixty hours a week, grow on very small spaces what formerly required acres and acres of land.

The result of all these recent conquests of culture is, that if one half only of the adults of a city gave each about fifty half-days for the culture of the finest fruit and vegetables out of season, they would have all the year round an unlimited supply of that sort of fruit and vegetables for the whole population.

But there is a still more important fact to notice. The greenhouse has nowadays a tendency to become a mere kitchen garden under glass. And when it is used to such a purpose, the simplest plank-and-glass unheated shelters already give fabulous crops — such as, for instance, 500 bushels of potatoes per acre as a first crop, ready by the end of April; after which a second and a third crop are obtained in the extremely high temperature which prevails in the summer under glass.

I gave in my “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” most striking facts in this direction. Sufficient to say here, that at Jersey, 34 men, with one trained gardener only, cultivate 13 acres under glass, from which they obtain 143 tons of fruit and early vegetables, using for this extraordinary culture less than 1000 tons of coal.

And this is done now in Guernsey and Jersey on a very large scale, quite a number of steamers constantly plying between Guernsey and London, only to export the crops of the greenhouses.

Nowadays, in order to obtain that same crop of 500 bushels of potatoes, we must plough every year a surface of 4 acres, plant it, cultivate it, weed it, and so on; whereas with the glass, even if we shall have to give perhaps, to start with, half a day’s work per square yard in order to build the greenhouse — we shall save afterwards at least one-half, and probably three-quarters of the formerly required yearly labour.

These are facts, results which every one can verify himself. And these facts are already a hint as to what man could obtain from the earth if he treated it with intelligence.