for manure. For two months the children are missing in the schools; and in the peasant families of the neighbourhood, when the question comes about some expenditure to be made, the usual saying is, “Wait till the season of the green peas has come.”
About Paris no less than 50,000 acres are given to the field culture of vegetables and 25,000 acres to the forced culture of the same. Sixty years ago the yearly rent paid by market-gardeners attained already as much as £18 and £24 per acre, and yet it has been increased since, as well as the gross receipts, which were valued by Courtois Gérard at £240 per acre for the larger market-gardeners, and twice as much for the smaller ones in which early vegetables are grown in frames.
The fruit culture in the neighbourhoods of Paris is equally wonderful. At Montreuil, for instance, 750 acres, belonging to 400 gardeners, are literally covered with stone walls, specially erected for growing fruit, and having an aggregate length of 400 miles. Upon these walls, peach trees, pear trees and vines are spread, and every year something like 12,000,000 peaches are gathered, as well as a considerable amount of the finest pears and grapes. The acre in such conditions brings in £56. This is how a “warmer climate” was made, at a time when the greenhouse was still a costly luxury. All taken, 1,250 acres are given to peaches (26,000,000 peaches every year) in the close neighbourhood of Paris. Acres and acres are also covered with pear trees which yield three to five tons of fruit per acre, such crop being sold at from £50 to £60. Nay, at Angers, on the Loire, where pears are eight days in advance of the suburbs of Paris, Baltet knows an orchard of five acres, covered with pears (pyramid trees), which brings in £400 every year; and at a distance of thirty-three miles from Paris one pear plantation brings in £24 per acre — the cost of package, transport and selling being deducted. Likewise, the plantations of plums, of which 80,000 cwts. are consumed every year at Paris alone, give an annual