Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

And when chance brought me, in 1896, in company with a local gardener, to a tiny, retired “vinery” of a veteran grower, I could see there, and admire, what a lover of gardening can obtain from so small a space as the two-thirds of an acre.

I saw again, in cool greenhouses--simple plank and glass shelters--pea plants covering the walls, for the length of one quarter of a mile, which already had yielded by the end of April 3,200 lb. of exquisite peas and were yet as full of…

I saw, for instance, three-fourths of an acre heated for the first three months of the year, from which about eight tons of tomatoes and about 200 lb. of French beans had been taken as a first crop in April, to be followed by two crops…

As I walked through such glass-roofed kitchen gardens, I could not but admire this recent conquest of man.

That so small an area of land can produce so much wealth is nothing short of astonishing.

A new system of horticulture--the market-garden under glass--is thus rapidly gaining ground.

However, a further advance is being made in order to emancipate horticulture from climate.

This is what can be achieved by an intelligent combination of agriculture with industry, and undoubtedly will be applied on a still larger scale in the future.

If one tenth part of what is done in the States and in Canada for favouring agriculture and horticulture were done in this country, English fruit would not have been so shamefully driven out of the market as it was a few years ago.

The reality, however, is that horticulture--that is, both market-gardening and fruit culture--has been brought in America to a high degree of perfection.

The results of this development are simply striking.

Strawberries, cherries, apricots, peaches and grapes follow each other in rapid succession, and at the same time cartloads of French beans, salads, cabbages, leeks, and potatoes are sent towards the industrial cities of the region.

This figure alone is the best answer to those who are fond of talking about the extraordinary fertility of the soil, each time they are told of some success in agriculture.

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.

In the most unproductive Sologne, irrigation has increased the hay crop from two tons per hectare (two and a half acres) to eight tons; in the Vendée, from four tons of bad hay to ten tons of excellent hay.

Considerable progress has been made lately in Cornwall, especially in the neighbourhood of Penzance, in the development of potato-growing and intensive market-gardening, and one may hope that the successes of these growers will incite…

But so long as this culture remains the work of isolated growers, its results must necessarily be inferior to those which the Jersey peasants obtain through their collective experience.

The wheat crop has thus increased in seventy-five years by 74 per cent., while the population increased only by 20 per cent.

The limit vanishes in proportion to our better study of the subject, and every year makes it vanish further and further from our sight.

Our means of obtaining from the soil whatever we want, under any climate and upon any soil, have lately been improved at such a rate that we cannot foresee yet what is the limit of productivity of a few acres of land.

But the little that has been said is sufficient to show that we have no right to complain of over-population, and no need to fear it in the future.

We have already, in the facts mentioned in this chapter, an experimental basis for quite a number of means of improving our present methods of culture and of largely increasing the crops.

Again, we may thus say, that where we require now three acres, one acre would be sufficient for growing the same amount of food, if planting wide apart were resorted to.

In fact, the eight and a half bushels required for one man’s annual food were actually grown at the Tomblaine station on a surface of 2,250 square feet, or forty-seven feet square--that is, on very nearly one-twentieth part of an acre.

The crop was thus more than doubled by the choice of seeds and by planting them separately eight inches apart.