12 MARCH 1948, Page 14

In the Garden Wherever I go, today by the New

Forest, yesterday in Norfolk, I see fields gleaming with cloches. They are perhaps (as the French maraichers have always realised, as also the Dutch) most useful about this date. Vegetables are most difficult to secure, not in winter, but in spring, and the cloche, which encourages early sowing as well as affording protection to the seedling, much reduces the length of this lean season. It does this 'even by putting forward the sowing of such vegetables as that supreme sluggard in germination, the leek.

W. BEACH THOMAS.