The care and attention bestowed by the market-gardeners is incredible to those who have not witnessed it; every inch of ground is taken advantage of--cultivation runs between the fruit-trees; storming-parties of cabbages and cauliflowers swarm up to the very trunks of apple-trees; raspberry-bushes are surrounded and cut off by young seedlings. If you see an acre of celery growing in ridges, be sure that, on a narrow inspection, you will find long files of young peas picking their way along the furrows. Everything flourishes here except weeds, and you may go over a 150-acre piece of ground without discovering a single one. Quality, even more than quantity, is attended to by the best growers; and they nurse their plants as they would children. The visitor will sometimes see "the heads" of an acre of cauliflowers one by one folded up in their own leaves as carefully as an anxious wife wraps up an asthmatic husband on a November night; and if rain should fall, attendants run to cover them up, as quickly as they cover up the zoological specimens at the Crystal Palace when the watering-pots are set to work.
Insects and blight are also banished as strictly as from the court of Oberon. To such a pitch is vigilance carried, that, according to a writer in _Household Words_, blight and fungi are searched after with a microscope, woodlice exterminated by bantems dressed in socks to prevent too much scratching, and other destructive insects despatched by the aid of batches of toads, purchased at the rate of six shillings a dozen!
The continual extension of London is, however, rapidly encroaching upon all the old market-gardens, and they are obliged to move farther a-field: thus high cultivation, like a green fairy-ring, is gradually widening and enlarging its circle round the metropolis. The coarser kinds of vegetables are but sparingly grown in these valuable grounds, but come up in large quantities from all parts of the country; and some of the choice kinds are now reared far away in Devonshire and Cornwall, where they are favoured by the climate. It would be interesting to get an authentic statement of the acreage dedicated to fruit and vegetables for the London market, but we find the information unattainable. Mr. Cuthill calculates that there are 200 acres employed around the metropolis in the growth of strawberries, and 5 acres planted as mushroom-beds. Cucumbers were once very largely cultivated. He has seen as many as 14 acres under hand-glasses in a single domain, and has known 200,000 gherkins cut in a morning for the pickle-merchants. Strangely enough, they have refused to grow well around London ever since the outbreak of the potato disease. The disastrous epidemic of 1849, we have little doubt, had much to do with the diminished supply, for the cholera soon brought about the result desired by Mrs. Gamp, "when cowcumbers is three for twopence," prices quite explanatory of the indisposition of the land to produce them. The very high state of cultivation in the metropolitan market-gardens necessitates the employment of a large amount of labour; and it is supposed that no less than 35,000 persons are engaged in the service of filling the vegetable and dessert-dishes of the metropolis. This estimate leaves out those in the provinces and on the Continent, which would, we doubt not, nearly double the calculation, and show a troop of men and women as large as the entire British army. There are five marts in London devoted to the sale of fruit--Covent Garden, Spitalfields, the Borough, Farringdon, and Portman-markets,--besides a vast number of street offsets, such as Clare-market, in which hawkers generally stand with their barrows. Covent Garden is not only their type, but it does nearly as much business as all of them put together, and for that reason we shall dwell upon it to the exclusion of the others.