Another oasis of market-gardening is offered by the county of Bedfordshire. “Being a county of natural small-holdings, carved out before the passing of the 1907 Act,” it is rapidly becoming--we are told by Mr. F. E. Green--“a county of market-gardens.” The fertility of its soil, the fact that it can easily be worked at any time of the year, and that a race of skilled gardeners has developed there long since, have contributed to that growth; but, of course, the whole is hampered by the heavy rents, which have grown up to £4 an acre for the sites near the station, where manure is received in large quantities from London.[125] Happily enough, the Bedfordshire County Council has been eager to acquire land for small holdings, and, after having spent £40,000 in the acquisition of land, they have, up to 30th June, 1911, provided one-third of the applicants with 2,759 acres--the total demand, by a thousand applicants, having already attained 12,350 acres. And yet all this progress still appears insignificant by the side of the demand for vegetables which grows every year (and necessarily _must_ grow, as is seen by comparing the low consumption of vegetables in this country with the consumption of home-grown vegetables in Belgium, indicated by Mr. Rowntree in his _Lessons from Belgium_). The result is a steadily increasing importation of vegetables to this country, which has attained now more than £8,000,000.[126] A branch of horticulture which has increased enormously since the first edition of this book was published, is the _growing of fruit and vegetables in greenhouses_, in the same way as it is done in the Channel Islands. All round London--we are told by Mr. John Weathers in the last edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_--the hothouse culture has taken a great development, and, in fact, along the railways which radiate from London in all directions the glass-houses have already become a familiar feature of the landscape. Immense quantities of grapes, tomatoes, figs, and of all sorts of early vegetables are grown at Worthing, where eighty-two acres are covered now with glass-houses, as also in the parish of Cheshunt, in Herts, where the area under hothouses is already 130 acres; while a careful estimate put in 1908 the area of individual hothouses in England at about 1,200 acres (_Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xi., p. 266). The elements of this culture having been developed by the experience of the Channel Islands growers, and by the wide extension which hothouses for the growing of flowers had taken long since in this country, it may be concluded from the various evidence we have at hand that on the whole this sort of culture is finding its reward, and is now firmly established.