use of those who would like to try their hand at the same work.
Most of my readers will probably ask first of all: What were the money results of this venture? But it would have been foolish to expect that in this first experiment everything should have run as smoothly as it runs, let us say, in the Channel Islands, where the many years’ practice of a whole population has worked out the best methods of culture.
Thus the frames were not ready in time for giving an early crop of melons; and although the melons grown at Maryland were excellent, and gave the first year as much as £188, they would have given much more than that had they been ready in the middle of June, which would have been possible if the frames and lights had been supplied in time.
With all that, the results obtained during the first year were really striking. All taken, Mr. Smith shows that if the gardener has a one-acre garden, and if £494 (say, £550) be spent for 1,000 glass-bells, 300 lights and 100 frames, 500 mats, the water-supply, the packing-shed, the fencing, the cart, horse and harness, etc., and £413 (say, £450) for 500 tons of manure, the rent, rates and water, and the wages and salaries (£250), the gross returns for the first year would reach £300 (making full allowance for “inexperience in this special work”). They would reach from £400 to £450 during the second year, there being greater productiveness and a lower expenditure after the loam has been made by heavy manuring, and personal experience has been won, as well t as experience for a given locality.
Taking a one-acre farm, of which only one-third is used for a French garden, the first year’s expenditure for bells, lights, fencing, horse manure, water, and rent and taxes would be a little less than £300, and the returns by the end of the first year would be about £150. “Afterwards the returns ought to reach from £200 to £250 each year,” Mr. Smith writes.
All that need be added to these words is, that Mr. Smith