I must refer the reader to the work of Charles Baltet if he will know more about the extension taken by market-gardening in different countries, and will only mention Belgium and America.
The exports of vegetables from Belgium have increased twofold within the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and whole regions, like Flanders, claim to be now the market-garden of England, even seeds of the vegetables preferred in this country being distributed free by one horticultural society in order to increase the export. Not only the best lands are appropriated for that purpose, but even the sand deserts of the Ardennes and peat-bogs are turned into rich market-gardens, while large plains (namely at Haeren) are irrigated for the same purpose. Scores of schools, experimental farms, and small experimental stations, evening lectures, and so on, are opened by the communes, the private societies, and the State, in order to promote horticulture, and hundreds of acres of land are covered with thousands of greenhouses.
Here we see one small commune exporting 5,500 tons of potatoes and £4,000 worth of pears to Stratford and Scotland, and keeping for that purpose its own line of steamers. Another commune supplies the north of France and the Rhenish provinces with strawberries, and occasionally sends some of them to Covent Garden as well. Elsewhere early carrots, which are grown amidst flax, barley and white poppies, give a considerable addition to the farmer’s income. In another place we learn that land is rented at £24 and £27 the acre, not for grapes or melon-growing but for the modest culture of onions; or that the gardeners have done away with such a nuisance as natural soil in their frames, and prefer to make their loam out of wood sawings, tannery refuse and hemp dust, “animalised” by various composts.[108]
In short, Belgium, which is one of the chief manufacturing countries of Europe, is now becoming one of the chief centres of horticulture. (See [Appendix R].)
The other country which must especially be recommended to the attention of horticulturists is America. When we see the mountains of fruit imported from America we are inclined to think that fruit in that country grows by itself. “Beautiful climate,” “virgin soil,” “immeasurable spaces”—these words continually recur in the papers. The reality, however, is that horticulture—that is, both market-gardening and fruit culture—has been brought in America to a high degree of perfection. Prof. Baltet, a practical gardener himself, originally from the classical marais (market-gardens) of Troyes, describes the “truck farms” of Norfolk in Virginia as real “model farms.” A highly complimentary appreciation from the lips of a practical maraîcher who has learned from his infancy that only in fairyland do the golden apples grow by the fairies’ magic wand. As to the perfection to which apple-growing has been brought in Canada, the aid which the apple-growers receive from the Canadian experimental farms, and the means which are resorted to, on a truly American scale, to spread information amongst the farmers and to supply them with new varieties of fruit trees—all this ought to be carefully studied in this country, instead of inducing Englishmen to believe that the American supremacy is due to the golden fairies’ hands. If one tenth part of what is done in the States and in Canada for favouring agriculture and horticulture were done in this country, English fruit would not have been so shamefully driven out of the market as it was a few years ago.
The extension given to horticulture in America is immense. The “truck farms” alone—that is, the farms which work for export by rail or steam—covered in the States in 1892 no less than 400,000 acres. At the very doors of Chicago one single market-gardening farm covers 500 acres, and out of these, 150 acres are given to cucumbers, 50 acres to early peas, and so on. During the Chicago Exhibition a special “strawberry express,” composed of thirty waggons, brought in every day 324,000 quarts of the freshly gathered fruit, and there are days that over 10,000 bushels of strawberries are imported in New York—three-fourths of that amount coming from the “truck farms” of Virginia by steamer.[109]
This is what can be achieved by an intelligent combination of agriculture with industry, and undoubtedly will be applied on a still larger scale in the future.