27 JANUARY 1933, Page 14

WHAT AN ACRE CAN Do.

The idea of the market, which owes much to Mrs. Musgrave, who has had experience of such movements in the United States, springs from a perception of the immense amount of food a small plot may produce. It is, for example, recorded in the leaflet that

" The principal of a preparatory school in Brighton had an allotment of one acre, partly given to fruit, chickens, ducks and rabbits. She raised vegetables enough to feed fifty people for nine months of the year, made 1,000 lb. of jams from the trees in the enclosure, -fed the boys on ducks, chickens and rabbits, and took six dozen eggs to the hospital on Christmas day over and above what was needed for the school and had been put down in water-glass."

This example, with a hundred others; illustrates and confirms Prince Kropotkin's famous thesis in Fields, Factories and Workshops. Under glass an acre may yield £1,000 worth of produce in a year. A perception of such possibilities is an invaluable lesson to any community. "II Taut cultivcr noire jardin " is a great maxim, but it is improved by the postscript " and market the surplus."

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