2660 cabbages, 70 bushels spinach, 950 cauliflowers, parsley, 1460
lettuces, 660 broccoli, 16 bushels potatoes, 19-1/4 bushels Brussels
sprouts, 106-1/2 gallons peas, 120 gallons artichokes, flowers, 267
vegetable marrows, 2976 carrots, 264 bundles radishes, 14 gallons
French beans, 12 gallons currants' 95-1/2 punnets mustard, 27 pounds
mushrooms, rhubarb, 948 bushels sprout tops, 38 dozen leeks, 1150
plants, 11-1/4 gallons broad beans, 97 bundles sea-kale, 978 bundles
of asparagus-kale, 504 beet roots, 2913 gallons gooseberries, 219
bundles mint, 20 bundles sage, 18 bundles of fennel, thyme, besides
one cartload of stones.
Mr. Vincent explains how he came to go into intensive cultivation:
"A few years ago the doctors said if I did not go out more I could
not live. Very well, just at that time there was an outcry about the
land not paying for cultivation. I could not understand this, for as
a boy at seven years of age I had to go out to farm work, therefore
I never went to school. Anyhow I thought something was very wrong if
the land would not pay; so, to compel myself to go out in the fresh
air, I took an allotment on the Sussex Downs to work in the early
morning before my daily duties began. I might say that I am a
waiter, and have been in my present situation forty years, so you
can understand I could not know much of land or garden work I could
not see my way clear in the few spare hours I get to take more than
half an acre of land to garden early, especially as I started
knowing practically nothing about such work, but I can manage to do
my half acre all alone.
"My garden is situated on the Brighton Race Hill ridge, and twelve
years ago it was but four inches of soil on chalk, but I now have a
foot of soil on the whole of the half acre, and year by year my
profits increase.
"Yes, get the men to stop on the land in this country. We ought not
to have workhouses. Every man could live, and live well, if he could
get the land, and would work it as it should be worked.
"Farmers and landowners grumble because the land does not pay. Now
for the fault. It is quite evident it is not the land, therefore, it
must be the fault of the man. Very well, get the land from these
landed proprietors, by sale preferred, and let it out to men, not by
1000 acres, as no man can farm well a thousand acres in England; let
the farms be greatly reduced, and then the land can be treated as it
should be. Most of us have children, and we all know how we love and
treat them. Treat the land in the same manner, feed it, and keep it
clean, and you will have no cause to complain. The land of old
England is as good as it ever was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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