Three main roads enter the town of Spalding, the last town on the Welland before it runs out into Fosdyke Wash. They come from the north, south, and east. The west has none, being one huge fen which, till comparatively recent times, admitted of locomotion only by boat. The southern road comes from Peterborough and enters the county by the bridge over the Welland at Market Deeping, a pleasant-looking little town with wide market-like streets and its four-armed signpost pointing to Peterborough and Spalding ten miles, and Bourne and Stamford seven miles.
THE WELLAND
From Deeping to Spalding the road is a typical fen road—three little inns and a few farm cottages and the occasional line of white smoke on the perfectly straight Peterborough and Boston railway is all there is to see save the crops or the long potato graves which are mostly by the road side.
The Welland at Cowbit Road, Spalding.
The Welland at High Street, Spalding.
BULB-GROWING
The potato trade is a very large one. Every cart or waggon we passed at Easter-time on the roads between Deeping and Kirton-in-Holland was loaded with sacks of potatoes, and all the farm hands were busy uncovering the pits and sorting the tubers. Donington and Kirton seemed to be the centres of the trade, Kirton being the home of the man who is known as the potato king, and has many thousands of acres of fenland used for this crop alone. Spalding itself is the centre of the daffodil market, and quantities of bulbs are grown here and annually exported to Holland, it is said, to find their way back to England in the autumn as Dutch bulbs. I do not vouch for the truth of this, but certainly the business, which has been for years a speciality of Holland, where the lie of the land and the soil are much the same as in the South Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire Fens, is now a large and lucrative industry here, and is each year expanding. The Channel and Scilly Islands and Cornwall can, of course, owing to their climate, get their narcissus into bloom earlier, but the conditions of soil are better in the Fens. Still, a liberal supply of manure is needed to insure fine blooms, and sixty or seventy tons to the acre is none too much, a crop of mustard or potatoes being taken off after its application before planting the bulbs. Hyacinths are still left to Holland, in one part of which, at Hillegom, near Haarlem, the soil has just that amount of sand and lime which that particular bulb demands. Tulips, however, are grown in England with great success; crocuses are seldom planted as they make such a small return on the outlay. For this outlay is very considerable, nine or ten women are needed to each plough for planting, which alone costs 45s. an acre, and then there is the constant weeding and cleaning of the ground, the picking, bunching and packing, which needs many hands at once; also there is the heavy cost of the bulbs themselves for planting, Narcissus poeticus will cost £50 an acre of 400,000 bulbs, but 270,000 of Golden Spur will cost £300 and fill the same space; others will cost prices halfway between these two. Tulips want more room, and at 180,000 to the acre some will cost as much as £500. Growers like to advertise big bulbs, but the harder and smaller English-grown bulb will often give as fine a bloom as the larger imported article. The whole industry is comparatively new, and a very pleasant one for the many women who are employed.
A DISTRIBUTING CENTRE