Home › French Gardening, 1909, by Thomas Smith
Tue, 01/05/2010 - 21:03 — admin

EXTRACT FROM KROPOTKIN'S "FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS"

"While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers whose very names will remain unknown to posterity have created of late a quite new agriculture, as superior to modern farming, as modern farming is superior to the old three fields system of our ancestors . . . . They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils because they make the soil themselves. . . . .



"Fifty years ago the 'culture maraîchère' was quite primitive. But now the Paris gar­dener not only defies the soil--he would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement--he defies climate. His walls which are built to reflect light, and to protect the wall-trees from the northern winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his frames and pepinières have made a real garden, a rich Southern gar­den out of the suburbs of Paris. He has given to Paris the 'two degrees less of lati-

xii "Fields, Factories, and Workshops"


tude' after which a French scientific writer was longing; he supplies his city with mountains of grapes and fruit at any season; and in the early spring he inundates and perfumes it with flowers. But he does not only grow articles of luxury. The culture of plain vegetables on a large scale is spreading every year; and the results are so good that there are now practical maraîchers who venture to maintain that if all the food, animal and vegetable, necessary for 3,500,000 in­habitants of the departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise had to be grown on their own territory (3,520 square miles) it could be grown without resorting to any other methods of cul­ture than those already in use--methods already tested on a large scale and proved to be successful. . . . .

"As a matter of fact .... if we analyze their system, we see that its very essence is first, to create for the plant a nutritive and porous soil, which contains both the necessary decaying organic matter and the inorganic compounds; and then to keep that soil and the surrounding atmosphere at a temperature and moisture superior to those of the open air. The whole system is summed up in these few words. If the French maraîcher spends prodigies of labor, intelligence and imagination in com­bining different kinds of manure so as to make them ferment at a given speed, he does so for no purpose but the above: a nourishing soil and a desired equal temperature of the air and the soil."